Lucie Brock=Broido on Max Ritvo

from Loosing Max Ritvo (New Yorker Feb, 2017)

 When I came across Max’s application, it was absolutely beckoning: his literary essay plainly brilliant, his personal essay kind of kooky. Midpage, he called out my name: “Lucie, if you’re reading this, check out my poem ‘Troy.’ ” He just sauntered up to the edge of the proscenium, and broke its convention. The poems leapt off the page: ungoverned, astronomical, astrological, indigenous (but from where?), witty, ensorcelling, and brave.

*****

As a student, Max was generous, often brilliant. Almost everything he did was magic—peculiar, off guard, tender, even tenderer. From time to time, a rogue joy would overtake him and he would bust into song during class—his voice was rich, handsome, trained, and this singing was seductive, and ridiculously, hilariously distracting. I told him that he’d have to go in the corner facing away from us if he did it again. He did it again.

*****

This is what it felt like to be Max’s teacher. I was the supervisor on her roller skates. I believe his imagination must have been born fully formed, before he had a language for his gifts. I think he was an infant scholar, a child genius, a Brother from Another Planet. For him, all of the synapses and fantasies, the humanity and spirit, were there just for the plucking. For me, as his mentor, all I needed to learn in order to teach him was to stay one roller glide ahead of him, to oversee the geometries and the effulgences of his imagination, to help beckon and tease each right wire into each right plug.

The work he turned in for class was often untethered, a beautiful little wreck on its way to being numinous. He may well have been one of the most willful young poets I’ve ever worked with; though ever courtly and irreverent and beguilingly comical in his manner, he was, in a sense, adamantine in his surrendering to change. But I never once caught him being innocent. He was in a hurry; he was dying, though he always carried with him the audacity of real hope.

In a poem, he had written, “Adore me to sleep before sleep can adore me on its own terms.”

There was always, for me, a finitude in every hour I spent with him. He did not carry that. He stood in front of it, stood beside it. I was the one who carried his constant impending death along with me. I have never mastered the art of embracing impermanence. Max had that down. It was as if he had eighty years of living already in him, at the age of twenty-two.

Our last pedagogical adventure took place in February of 2016. At the end of the M.F.A. program, each student submits a thesis, a book-length manuscript of poems that will eventually become his or her first book. Two professors read each thesis, each professor writes a response, then we meet together with the student for a one-hour conference.