Voilà! The Diane Middlebrook Memorial Writers’ Residence has been launched. I attended the dedication ceremony this afternoon, way up in forested hills around LaHonda, Skyline, and Woodside. (I wrote about the venture earlier, here.) Got mightily lost, too.
"Above all, radiant" (Photo: Amanda Lane)
Renowned chemist, novelist, and playwright Carl Djerassi, Diane Middlebrook‘s husband, assured the 50 or 60 gathered in the brilliant August day about the “green” nature of the four new domiciles built in memory of the gifted and groundbreaking biographer, who died in 2007. The Djerassi Resident Artists Program currently hosts about 60 artists a year. The spare new residences, overlooking the hills, will add a few more.
The 87-year-old Djerassi read a poem written by the person who had been the second oldest resident ever – Janet Lewis, the wife (and by then widow) of legendary Yvor Winters. She was 90 at the time – two years younger than the composer who holds the record in the program. The poem Carl read, “Landscape near Bear Gulch Road,” had been written during her residency.
Carl recalled his wife worked only on ambitious projects. When her cancer diagnosis gave her only months to live, she turned to her personal brand of therapy, he said – that is, “to immerse yourself totally in intellectual work.” Middlebrook tackled a biography of Ovid, which, “though unfinished, has been published posthumously in portions as ‘A Roman in his Prime’ in the Norton Critical edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and as ‘Ovid Is Born,’ in Feminist Studies,” according to the program’s website. I had wondered what happened to it.
Until today, I wasn’t aware that Dana Gioia, Diane’s student, had published the author’s only collection of poems, Gin Considered as a Demon, in 1983, when he was editing a series of chapbooks for Elysian Press. He waved the volume at the gathering. He also waved the battered paperback of Wallace Stevens‘s poems that he had studied with Diane way back in 1971.
He described Diane Middlebrook as “above all, radiant.” Such people are rare, he said: “in the warmth, enlightenment, and clarity of their presence we discover ourselves.”
Dana read Stevens’s “Final Soliloquy.” But Diane’s daughter, Leah Middlebrook, read a rapt and haunting poem that Dana had composed at the Djerassi home-in-the-hills, “Becoming a Redwood.” It concludes:
Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.
You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of the moonlight as the moonlight falls,
Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight’s watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.
