It’s a sunny, still, Sunday, the Fourth of July. I have been pulling fistfuls of a ground-cover I wish I had never planted from around the roses, a tricky and not entirely successful endeavor. It has been some days since I received an email from Ron Padgett with the ominous heading “sad news.” I knew immediately what it must be, since Kenward has been declining for some years, and had turned, in April, ninety-three. While I was endeavoring to dissuade the invasive plant, I could hear Kenward’s voice singing what I want to know is/ when the good times waaaane/ who’ll prop me up in the rain? He had a strong, warm voice, both in speaking and singing, with a resonance, like a cello’s, at the lower end.
Spellcheck wants to change his name to keyword.
We met when I was still living in London, in the early 1970s. I cannot recall under what auspices this meeting occurred, but I think he had written to me prior to his coming to England. And when I began my protracted return to New York (it took almost two years of coming and going and coming again), he invited me to stay for a while on the top floor of his house at 104 Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. I was waiting on tables at the Broome Street Bar, trying to figure out how to reconnect to poetry and art here, having been away for seven years.
It would be hard to overestimate the significance of Kenward’s friendship over the next decades; he extended, allowed, encouraged, included; he gave me a sense of belonging which began to alter the image of itinerant stray I often felt myself to be. This familial feeling rose from his bearing; a solicitous, empathic kindness. He believed in reciprocity. We shared stories of our difficult families; we read to each other from letters, poems; he played his songs as they were being written. He liked conversation; he was mild in manner, gracious and curious about the details of life; he loved writing and receiving postcards; these he also collected with a zealot’s passion. Cultural ephemera moved and amused him. He typed his messages, and signed his name in flowing blue ink.
He liked a certain wickedness of tongue and would give out a short hoot of delight disguised as shock. He did not suffer fools gladly and had a nose for falsity; he used the phrase “true blue” which meant, I think, persons who were without guile or subterfuge; not pretentious or cunning; an ethics of personal fidelity that one could trust. He did not disguise his inherited wealth, but neither was he ostentatious, and many over the years benefited from his often anonymous magnanimity. He gave wonderful parties, at which worlds of theatre and music and poetry and art and publishing mingled happily, as if we were all denizens from another era of social ease. (These gatherings on Greenwich Avenue felt entirely different from the gallery openings and dinners that often followed them, which invariably were about strategies of connection.) Kenward’s life and work straddled all of these practices, but he wasn’t a dilettante, dabbling; he was devoted and engaged and demanding of himself and of others; he was constitutionally discerning and critical. His relation to ambition was complex; the idea of a professional career was, I think, anathema, and he showed something like anxious disdain as he witnessed the academy’s increasing infiltration into the lives of younger artists and poets. What happened to the Poem as Poem? he lamented.
He often wore a large medallion at events, and liked it when persons dressed up, although he dressed deliberately casually, even sloppily. He could be moody, almost petulant, which I thought arose from some lingering childhood disappointment and sorrow. His poems are layered slides of linguistic brilliance shot through with humor and pathos. I think he wanted more than anything to be recognized for his work as a writer; a poet and lyricist. The Glass Harp; Lizzie Borden. We went to the opening at Glimmerglass; I think I drove for the first time with a passenger on big roads! Talk about trust. (City girl, I learned to drive very late.) He read widely and loved the idea of collaboration as evidence of community and care, as many of his Z Press publications attest. He had some lovely objects but was not acquisitive. He liked giving and receiving gifts; the ceremonies of birthdays and holidays. This pleasure he shared with Joe. I sometimes think Kenward’s greatest gift to me was meeting and becoming friends with Joe Brainard. And I think Joe’s death must have been the beginning of Kenward’s protracted withdrawal from the world.
He had a collection of souvenir spoons which he kept in a large glass. He loved to cook and was very good at it, improvising and elaborating on, say, Marcella Hazan. He liked cheese and cream. Summers, I would visit him and Joe in Calais, Vermont, where Kenward had a simple house that sat above a pond, in which we (but not Kenward) would swim, often joined by Ron and Pat. Sometimes Bill and Beverly Corbett would drive over; or we would drive to them. Kenward had a vegetable garden; we ate salad and peas from it. He and I flew to California and gave some readings together; we went to Bolinas where I met Joanne Kyger and Bill Berkson for the first time. I hate to fly; it terrifies me. I remember, flying back, sitting next to Kenward, I felt safe.
Forty years ago we were sitting together maybe in Vermont, maybe drinking Campari, maybe about to play a game of backgammon. I was lamenting yet another failed romance. Whatever happened to mindless bliss? I sighed. Kenward gave out one of his hoots of pleasure. That fall, I turned forty, and Kenward gave me a poem composed of thirteen stanzas of quatrains, called “Mindless Bliss.” It is framed on my study wall.
4 July 2022