saskia
Saskia and I crossed paths only briefly. It didn’t seem like briefly at the time. Partly when you’re young, time passes more slowly. Partly when you have a friend, even a fairly peripheral friend, you don’t imagine that the friendship will end, not badly, but just because that’s the way it goes. When you’re young, you’re not aware of the way people will move in and out of your life, even people who are important to you. And even for us not-young people, the nature of friendship requires suspending disbelief, ignoring the possibility that we might not have this person in our lives forever.
We met at Kenyon, in the Writing Center. I was a senior, Saskia was a year behind me, and we had both been enlisted as tutors. She was kind of famous - you know, Kenyon-famous. It probably helped having a name like Saskia, being almost certainly the only one in the history of the college to that point; she didn’t need to be Saskia Hamilton: just Saskia. However Kenyon-famous I might have been, I always needed a last name; heck, there were two Chris Smiths in my class. (One of them had been my roommate, and every time I mentioned him the inevitable question was, “Wait, which Chris Smith?”)
I don’t know how Kenyon-famous I was. A little more than I realized, I think. I had never distinguished myself in any specific way: not as a football player (or, this being Kenyon in the ’80s, a swimmer); not as an actor or an activist; a good student but no Rhodes Scholar contender. And not, to name the real Kenyon royalty of those days, a poet.
Saskia was a poet, and if she didn’t hold the crown, she was certainly first in line. Oh, she was good. At 20 she was producing poems that would take your breath away. They’d be published in the Collegian or Hika or whatever the publication of the month was, and even if you never quite knew what she was talking about - we’ll get to that - you would sit in wonder at her ability to craft a line, to set down the most musical phrasing, to fill sentences with multiple meanings that would unfold in front of you.
We became friends because Sheila Jordan, the wife of Kenyon’s president and herself a poet, had tapped us both as tutors in the writing lab she was starting. We would sit there on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening, sometimes helping a fellow student structure an essay, sometimes, if it was quiet - it was usually quiet, especially early in the term - reading, sometimes chatting. I couldn’t tell you a single thing we talked about. Our classes. What we were planning to do next. Sheila and her challenging relationship with the mixed-breed retriever that she and President Jordan had taken in. Our professors. Saskia could do a wicked impression of Phil Church, yet another poet and editor of the Kenyon Review. It was so good and funny that I shamelessly stole it, until a mutual friend said, “That’s not an impression of Church, that’s an impression of Saskia doing her impression of Phil Church.” Busted.
We probably talked about poetry from time to time, although she was way better read than I was, especially among contemporary poets, so I recall being too intimidated to get very deep into that subject. I could throw out names; she would have read their entire oeuvre.
And that was the thing - the thing that made her royalty. There were loads of us who had arrived on the Hill with gauzy dreams of being writers that we moved toward, slant-wise; we majored in English and took fiction writing from Kluge and went to see the various luminaries who came to campus to give readings and tolerate tea and cookies with Sheila and a bunch of undergraduates. Saskia knew what she wanted to do and she calmly set her rudder directly toward that light, and while it didn’t hurt that she had some natural talent and insight and an ear, it surely helped more that she did the work. There were some of us who wanted to be writers, and others like Saskia who wanted to write.
In that regard, being in her company might have felt like both a gift and a reproach. Except that nothing about Saskia was reproachful; she was kind and gentle and, if I would tell her what I was working on - I’m sure I didn’t have the nerve to share very much - she would express nothing but delight. It made her happy, I think, to have fellow travelers.
I do remember talking with her once about Jorie Graham - it might have been an evening in the writing lab; it might have been some other time. Graham was one of those contemporary poets I had a hard time getting. Graham was, is, famously and unapologetically difficult; I’d heard an interview where she was asked what a poem meant, and her response was, “The poem means what it says ... If I could have said it any other way, I would have done that.” I remember we talked about her, because I can remember the way Saskia lit up upon hearing the name “Jorie Graham.” I’m not sure there’s a writer, then or now, that I would react to that way.
I mention it because Saskia’s poetry, too, could be difficult. I had a teacher in high school who liked to draw a distinction between “public” and “private” poems - “Is this poem public or private?” he would ask. It seemed to me then, and even more now, an exceedingly dumb way of categorizing poetry, like a poem could either be a reptile or a mammal. All poems are in some measure private; all poems, if they’re meant to be read, are public. (I’m not sure what to do with Emily Dickinson in this regard, but whatever.) Saskia’s poetry, it seems to me, lives squarely in that tension: There is always something going on that you don’t understand, that you will never understand. And at the same time, her poems are so affecting, and tug at some buried emotion that you didn’t even remember was there. Her ability to do that, to cut away the obvious and explicit and leave only the essential, to create some diaphanous bridge between you and this person you don’t know - well, it’s what made her a poet, and the rest of us her subjects.
I graduated. Then I saw Saskia a bit more, because I still hadn’t figured out how to be a writer nor how not to be a writer, and I ended up working for the public relations office at Kenyon. One of my projects during the year I was there was serving as location manager for a promotional video we made called “On Friendship.” It paired faculty and their students or former students; Saskia was in one of the pairs along with the English professor Ron Sharp. So I got to hang out with her a little bit then; got to see her blush when Ron predicted, “I think Saskia is going to become a major American poet.”
The last time I saw her, she had made good on that. We had totally lost touch, but by some good luck I saw a notice about a reading she was doing at the New School. Her poems were wonderful; they were difficult. (And it’s so much harder to keep up with difficult poems at a reading - you just have to let them wash over you.)
She was really good at reading. She had a lovely and distinctive voice, one you wanted to listen to forever.
We caught up for a few minutes afterward, shared a laugh about - I don’t know, Sheila’s dog? I left glowing and looking forward to seeing her again sometime.
A friend told me yesterday about her death. My quick search turned up a poem published a month or so ago in the New Yorker - you know, where major American poets get published. They have a link where you can hear her read it, in that same voice, not the young woman I knew but just as lovely, just as true.