Lucie Brock-Broido

Lucie Brock-Broido
Born	May 22, 1956 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Died	March 6, 2018 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Occupation	Poet, Professor
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars (BA, MA) Columbia University (MFA)
Genre	Poetry
Notable works	A Hunger (1988) The Master Letters (1995) Trouble in Mind (2004) Soul Keeping Company (2010) Stay, Illusion (2013)
Notable awards	Guggenheim Fellowship National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship National Book Award (Finalist) National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist)
Website
www.luciebrockbroido.com

Lucie Brock-Broido born "Lucy Brock" (May 22, 1956 – March 6, 2018) was an American poet, widely acclaimed as one of the most distinctive and influential voices of her generation. Noteworthy for her work as a teacher, Brock-Broido served as a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University, the Briggs-Copeland Poet in Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University, and as Professor of Creative Writing and Director of Poetry at Columbia University. Throughout her career, she mentored multiple generations of new American poets, including Tracy K. Smith, Timothy Donnelly, Kevin Young, Mary Jo Bang, Stephanie Burt, and Max Ritvo.

Brock-Broido's final collection Stay, Illusion, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2013 to wide-spread critical acclaim, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award. Notices of her death in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker, praised her “brilliant nervosity,” “beautifully embroidered, fanciful language,” and the “formal rigor and a supernatural sensibility that placed her in the lineage of revelatory American poetic voices like Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.”

Early Life

Brock-Broido was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on May 22, 1956. Her father David Broido was a real estate developer, and her mother Virginia “Ginger” Brock Greenwald was a theatre artist. Throughout her career, Greenwald was a prolific playwright, appeared on screen in the films of George A. Romero, served on the Board of Directors for the Pittsburgh Playhouse, and regularly directed plays at the City Theatre.

Throughout childhood, Brock-Broido shared her mother's love for theatre, performing in local productions of plays by Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, and August Strindberg. Despite initial plans to become and actress and playwright, Brock-broido would later recall in an interview with Guernica,

I stopped my love affair with theater because I had irrevocable stage fright, which I still have. What I do with my life now is manage my stage fright, because when you’re the teacher, you have to be Miss Julie or Solange in The Maids. You have to live inside The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Or become Miss Jean Brodie “in the prime of her life”. Or become Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park.

She eventually embraced poetry as an adolescent, once recalling,

I came to poetry because I felt I couldn’t live properly in the real world. I was thirteen and in Algebra class. That was the day I decided I would be a poet for all time. I walked out of class and dropped out of school. That doesn’t mean I became a poet, but I did have this absolute severance with one period of my life where I felt I was being made to live in the world I was brought into—Straight-A student, The Most Perfect Little Girl—that I couldn’t inhabit anymore. And so I went to a place I felt I could inhabit which turned out to be, as we know about poetry, more hellish than the one I left!

It was at this time that she changed her given name of "Lucy Brock" to "Lucie Brock-Broido," as the later was "more becoming of a poet." She attended the Wightman School before matriculating in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she studied under the poet Richard Howard and completed consecutive Bachelor's and Master's of Arts degrees in Creative Writing. In a 1995 interview with BOMB Magazine she would recall,

I remember a time in 1979 when Richard Howard, who was my teacher at Johns Hopkins, asked us all to submit a poem in order to be admitted to his graduate workshop. I gave him an eighty-something page poem called “Pornography,” and he handed it back to me a week later, put his monocle on, and said, “My dear, there’s not a line break in the whole 80 pages.” At which point I thought I would writhe on the train station platform where we stood. I thought, “What do you mean there’s not a line break? Look at the lines, there are thousands of them!” But I had no concept of what a line break—no less a line—was. You spend a lifetime making up your line. Or—in every book, you reinvent the thing itself.

Brock-Broido went on to complete an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University, where she studied under the poet Stanley Kunitz, who she would call “my prophet-teacher.” Kunitz would later praise his former student noting, “Brock-Broido’s brilliant nervosity and taste for the fantastic impel her to explore the obscure corners of the psyche and the fringes of ordinary human experience. Her poems are original, strange, often unsettling, and mostly beautiful.”

Career

After graduating from Columbia in 1982, Brock Broido was awarded a year long fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. During her fellowship year, Brock-Broido lived in residency alongside fellow writers Cyrus Cassells, Alice Fulton, Cynthia Huntington, Neil McMahon, and Kate Wheeler, as she developed what would eventually become her first collection, A Hunger. She further developed the collection the following year as a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia.

In the mid 1980s Brock-Broido moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which at the time was “the epicenter of American poetry.” During this period she befriended fellow poet Marie Howe, a relationship that would deeply impact the work of both women. In 1985 Brock-Broido received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Then in 1987 she received both a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and Narrative Poetry Award from the New England Review.

A Hunger

In 1988 Brock-Broido published her debut poetry collecting A Hunger with Alfred A. Knopf to wide-spread critical acclaim. In a review for The New Yorker, Helen Vendler noted

“Brock-Broido’s talismanic words open into a magical territory of ‘Domestic Mysticism'... A violently skewed portrait of the female poet and her Muse, a hyped-up version of Stevens and his interior paramour, locked in a soliloquy ‘in which being there together is enough’... Something in Brock-Broido likes stealth, toxicity, wildness, neon—‘perfect mean lines’... The poems lead off the page.”

Cynthia Macdonald offered similiar praise noting, “These poems are out of Stevens in the abundance, glitter, and seductiveness of their language, out of Browning in the authority of their inhabiting, and out of Plath in the ferocity and passion of their holding on—to feeling, to life, and to us... An astonishing first book.” A Hunger was subsequently reprinted three times in the following six years.

Following the success of her first collection, Brock-Broido was appointed the Briggs-Copeland Poet in Residence at Harvard University, a position she would hold for three years until being promoted to Director of Creative Writing in 1991. During her tenure she was awarded the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and The Jerome J. Shestack Prize from The American Poetry Review. In 1993 she left Harvard to join the faculty of Columbia University as a Professor of Creative Writing and Director of Poetry, a position she would hold until her death in 2018.

The Master Letters

In 1995 Brock-Broido published her sophomore poetry collecting The Master Letters with Alfred A. Knopf to wide-spread critical acclaim. According the book's jacket copy,

The title of this richly textured book derives from two of the three mysterious letters left by Emily Dickinson--the ones addressed to "Dear Master." Lucie Brock-Boido has imagined a series of letters echoing devices found in Dickinson's own work. "We feel we are in the presence of something entirely new, " says Bonnie Costello in The Boston Review. "Not even Brock-Broido's wonderful first book, A Hunger, prepares us for this bold encounter."

The "Briefly Noted" section of The New Yorker praised the collection, writing

Lucie Brock-Broido’s Fifty-two poems exploring power and powerlessness, consciousness and self-consciousness the whole phrased as an homage to Emily Dickinson. Dickinson's nineteenth-century devices serve Brock-Broido as camoufläge for the post-Holocaust belief that in a time of total war social, racial, psychosexual, spintual coherence is either dishonest or impossible. In a weird reversal of poetic power, the author risks gibberish even courts it and (sometimes) makes her case. Images from taxidermy, Pompey, an execution lead her to tour-de-force fusions of derangement and sense.

Carole Maso offered similar praise, stating “I had found her first book, A Hunger, to be a mesmerizing and riotous rhetorical celebration and could not wait to see what would follow. Over the next seven years the intriguing Master Letter poems would slowly begin to appear in various magazines. Yet nothing could prepare me for the impact of the final text. It is a rigorous and dizzying book. A book of rage and renunciations and acute praise. A book of dark concoctions, of strange, gorgeous potions: Lamb’s Blood and Chant, Crave and Ruin. A Book of Swoon and Fever and Goodbye. A Book of Mysterious Elusive Universe.” After the success of collection, Brock-Broido received a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the 1996 Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Master Letters was subsequently reprinted in 1997 due to popular demand. In 1998, Brock-Broido received her second National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, in support of her next collection, Trouble in Mind.

Trouble in Mind

In 2004 Brock-Broido published her third collection, Trouble in Mind, with Alfred A. Knopf to further critical acclaim. According the book's jacket copy,

With Trouble in Mind, her long-awaited third collection, Lucie Brock-Broido has written her most exceptional poems to date. There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,” Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experience–a quest that is as capricious as it is uncompromising. In the process, she reveals, unsparingly, things as they are. In “Pamphlet on Ravening” she recalls, “I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side.” The book is laced with sequences: haunted, odd self-portraits; a succession of poems provoked by discarded titles by Wallace Stevens; an intermittent series of fractured and beguiling lyrics that she variously refers to as fragments, leaflets, and apologues. Trouble in Mind is a book that astonishes us afresh at the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock-Broido is not afraid to follow where it may lead her: “That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing / (As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit / The quiet velvet cult of it, / Yet trouble came.” Even trouble, in Brock-Broido’s idiom, becomes something resplendent.

The "Briefly Noted" section of The New Yorker praised the collection, writing

Brock-Broido populates her third volume of poems with such calamitous individuals as a Rontanov child awaiting the Russian Revolution and a transient who committed suicide by entering a lion's den at the National Zoo. These tragic figures exist in counterpoint to the poet's confrontation of the deaths of parents and companions. She tempers the supernatural visitations and baroque lexicon that have characterized her earlier work with an affecting skepticism, emerging from a lengthy bedside vigil with the epiphany "I made no wish, save being / Merely magical. I am magical / No more." The elegy is a form that more pedestrian poets often taint with mawkishness, but in Brock-Broido's hands it yields great conceptual and syntactical variety.

Larissa Szporluk offered similar praise, stating "Lucie Brock-Broido’s third volume of poetry marks the return of a familiar yet altered voice—a vivacious blend of childlike lamentation, love lyric, and elegy, all spurred into expression by the death of parents, entry into middle age, frustration with the postures of art, and timeless agonies of time’s passage. The imperious and the infantile, clasped together throughout this five-part collection, work to create a jumpy, brooding, highly charged poetry—the same poetic “animal” we encountered in A Hunger(1988) and The Master Letters (1995), only now it is brandishing a stripe." Trouble in Mind was subsequently awarded the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award.  

Soul Keeping Company

In 2010 Brock-Broido published her first "Selected Poems" entitled Soul Keeping Company with Carcanet Press to enthusiastic critical praise. According the book's jacket copy,

Lucie Brock-Broido's poetry conjures what is half-known, at the limits of experience, in language fierce with a living glitter. The familiar world becomes richly disquieting, edged with danger: mute conjoined twins creating a violent secret world; Emily Dickinson's enigmatic letters to her 'Master'; a self-portrait of the poet 'with Her Hair on Fire'. "Soul Keeping Company" introduces Brock-Broido's poetry to British readers with generous selections from her three acclaimed collections: A Hunger, The Master Letters, and Trouble in Mind.

In a review for The Scotsman, John Burnside noted

In June this year, Carcanet published Soul Keeping Company, a long overdue selection of Lucie Brock-Broido's astonishing and extraordinarily powerful work. Brock-Broido has been described as an 'elliptical' poet, which may or may not be helpful; in reviews, the word that crops up most frequently is 'gorgeous', but what matters most is that this poet, more than any other I can think of, constantly renews our sense of the possibilities of the language we use, not just in our conversations with others, but in the inner dialogues that accompany love, loss, betrayal, self-revelation and grief. Brock-Broido's marriages of the abstract and the concrete, and of the wild and the familiar, not only make things strange (to borrow Seamus Heaney's famous dictum) but also create a sense that this strangeness is more like home than the sorry approximations that convention allows: ‘ In the space between seasons / Which is one night in a life, / The corn beats inside its stalks, waiting for bloom. / The wheat flowers, falls easily. / The clouds become enormous & have names.’ There is no other poet, working anywhere, who does what Brock-Broido does and Carcanet performs what is, quite simply, a public service in making her work available to us.

Soul Keeping Company was subsequently awarded a 2010 Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

Stay, Illusion

In 2013 Brock-Broido published her fourth and most acclaimed collection to date, Stay, Illusion, with Alfred A. Knopf. According the book's jacket copy,

"Stay, Illusion, the much-anticipated volume of poems by Lucie Brock-Broido, illuminates the broken but beautiful world she inhabits. Her poems are lit with magic and stark with truth: whether they speak from the imagined dwelling of her “Abandonarium,” or from habitats where animals are farmed and harmed “humanely,” or even from the surreal confines of death row, they find a voice like no other—dazzling, intimate, startling, heartbreaking. Eddying between the theater of the lavish and the enigmatic, between the gaudy and the unadorned, Brock-Broido’s verse scours America for material to render unflinchingly the here and now. Grandeur devolves into a comic irony: “We have come to terms with our Self / Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.” She dares the unexplained: “The wings were left ajar / At the altar where I’ve knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough / As sugar raw, and sweet.” Each poem is a rebellious chain of words: “Be good, they said, and so too I was / Good until I was not.” Strange narratives, interior and exterior, make a world that is foreign and yet our own; like Dickinson, Brock-Broido constructs a spider-sibling, commanding the “silk spool of the recluse as she confects her eventual mythomania.” And why create the web? Because: If it is written down, you can’t rescind it.”

In a review for The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson noted

“Stay, Illusion, the title of Lucie Brock-Broido’s new book of poems, her fourth in twenty-five years, is borrowed from Horatio’s fruitless command to the ghost of King Hamlet. Illusions don’t stay, of course—that’s how we know they were illusions—but poets often talk directly to them anyway. Brock-Broido’s poems, haunted by old words and meanings, full of occult spells and curses, nearly Pre-Raphaelite in their taste for gilt and gaud, have much to say to the dead. Her work offers autobiography not as memoir—the chosen mode of so many American poets—but, rather, as grimoire... Almost every human trauma is surveyed in the course of the book. What is it like to get older? Are we stranded, like the “big beautiful / blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice”? Or simply diminished, wizened, weakened, “like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit”? “A boy’s will is the wind’s will”—Robert Frost reminded us of these lines from Longfellow, once upon a time. In “A Girl’s Will,” Brock-Broido remembers a time when she was as free and beautiful, and as potentially lethal, as the flowing scarves of Isadora Duncan “in August wind.” Back then, “the dead / Don’t quarrel and will listen, finally, to Lucie now—still scribbling / Beneath her white uncorseted umbrella in the first draft of an / early fall.” But in Stay, Illusion the dead are disobedient in the extreme.”

A diverse group of poets and critics heralded Stay, Illusion as Brock-Broido’s greatest triumph, celebrating the poets “ferocity and grandeur” (Mark Doty), “gaudy wisdom” (Richard Howard), “abundance, glitter, and seductiveness” (Cynthia Macdonald), “brutally clipped sentences and brilliant timing” (Bonnie Costello), and “the most febrile imagination poetry has to offer.” (Carolyn D. Wright).

Awards and honors

• 1983 Grolier Poetry Prize, Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Cambridge
• 1983 Poetry Fellowship, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown
• 1984 Henry Hoyns Fellowship in Poetry, University of Virginia
• 1985 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship
• 1987 New England Review Narrative Poetry Award
• 1987 Massachusetts Artist Fellowship in Poetry
• 1988 Briggs-Copeland Poet, Harvard University (1988–93)
• 1989 Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching
• 1990 The Jerome J. Shestack Prize from The American Poetry Review
• 1991 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award
• 1996 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1996 Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for The Master Letters
• 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship
• 2005 Massachusetts Book Award for Trouble in Mind
• 2010 Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for "Soul Keeping Company"
• 2013 Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award
• 2013 Finalist, National Book Award (Poetry) for Stay, Illusion
• 2013 Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award (Poetry) for Stay, Illusion
• 2015 Finalist, The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award for Stay, Illusion

Bibliography

Collections

• Brock-Broido, Lucie. A Hunger. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
• Brock-Broido, Lucie. The Master Letters. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
• Brock-Broido, Lucie. Trouble In Mind. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
• Brock-Broido, Lucie. Soul Keeping Company. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press , 2010.
• Brock-Broido, Lucie. Stay, Illusion. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

List of poems

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected
Noctuary	2013	Brock-Broido, Lucie (April 15, 2013). "Noctuary". The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 9. pp. 36–37. Retrieved 2016-08-05.

Critical studies and reviews of Brock-Broido's work

• Chiasson, Dan (October 28, 2013). "The ghost writer: Lucie Brock-Broido's "Stay, Illusion"". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 34. pp. 78–79. Retrieved 2017-06-18.

External links

• The Borzoi Reader, randomhouse.com; accessed March 8, 2018.
• "Little Industry of Ghosts", gulfcoastmag.org; accessed March 8, 2018.
• Lucie Brock-Broido Papers at the Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library