from "Time Pieces" by Rachel Wetzsteon
Cheering: it was done.
But soon the Great War would be
renamed World War One.
"Time Pieces," a brilliant sequence of haikus, firstappeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young forThe Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, which Scribner published in 2013. A Yale alumna, Wetzsteon did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She taught at Barnard College. A poet of great intelligence and formal ability, she had just been named poetry editor of The New Republic when she died by her own hand on or just before Christmas 2009.
-- sdl (11/11/18)
I had the great pleasure of knowing Rachel Wetzsteon. She was a brilliant, kind, modest, caring young woman. Her passionate poems wiped me out. She was great. I am happy to see her today on BAP. Thank you.
Posted by: Emily Fragos | October 08, 2021 at 02:02 PM
Thank you for commenting, Emily. She was such a talented poet -- such a loss.
Posted by: David Lehman | October 08, 2021 at 05:46 PM
The world of poetry needed Rachel. She was such a brilliant and nice person, such a gifted poet. The last time I heard from her in an email, she sounded perfectly fine. I had no clue. Her suicide came as a shock. The sad loss is still felt by many.
Thank you, David, for featuring Rachel. It does the heart good.
Posted by: Emily Fragos | October 08, 2021 at 10:51 PM
Cheering: it was done.
But soon the Great War would be
renamed World War One.
I'd never heard of never heard of Rachel Wetzsteon, but the economy, entropic resonance, furiously subdued intensity of her reinvented haiku, and the story of her furiously achieved self-erasure, sad eyes and beautiful smile, leaves me too in the Charybdis of an ever-widening tailspin.
Posted by: Kenneth Rosen | October 09, 2021 at 08:39 PM