{{short description|American poet}} {{Use mdy dates|date=November 2022}} {{Infobox writer | name = Jean Garrigue | image = Image 8 Garrigue1.tif | imagesize = | alt = | caption = | pseudonym = Jean Garrigue | birth_name = Gertrude Louise Garrigus | birth_date = {{Birth date|1912|12|08}} | birth_place = Evansville, Indiana | death_date = {{Death date and age|1972|12|27|1912|12|08}} | death_place = Boston, Massachusetts | occupation = Writer | nationality = American | ethnicity = | citizenship = | education = | alma_mater = Universities of Chicago & Iowa | period = | genre = Poetry/Fiction/Non-fiction | subject = | movement = | notableworks = | spouse = | partner = | children = | relatives = | influences = | influenced = | awards = | signature = | website = | portaldisp = }}
'''Jean Garrigue''' (December 8, 1912 – December 27, 1972) was an American poet. In her lifetime, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a nomination for a National Book Award.<ref name="EncycloJean">{{cite web |title=Garrigue Jean |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/garrigue-jean |accessdate=26 October 2022 |website=encyclopedia.com }}</ref>
==Life==
Jean Garrigue was born Gertrude Louise Garrigus in Evansville, Indiana, to Allan Colfax and Gertrude (Heath) Garrigus. She was born in 1912 but later gave 1914 as her birth year.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Garrigue |first=Jean |url=https://archive.org/details/selectedpoems0000garr |title=Selected Poems |date=1992 |publisher=University of Illinois Press |isbn=0-252-06224-8 |editor-last=J.D. |editor-first=McClatchy |location=Urbana |pages=xi |oclc=23386619}}</ref> She had one sister, Marjorie, and one brother, Ross.<ref name="JeanNYT">{{cite news|title=Jean Garrigue|work=The New York Times |date=December 28, 1972 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/28/archives/jean-garriguepoet-dies-at-591-taught-and-lectured-wldeiyl.html|accessdate=26 October 2022}}</ref>
Garrigue lived in Indianapolis for much of her early life, graduating from Shortridge High School in 1931.<ref name="IndyJean">{{cite web |title=Jean Garrigue |url=https://indyencyclopedia.org/jean-garrigue/ |accessdate=26 October 2022 |website=indyencyclopedia.org |date=February 5, 2021 |publisher=Encyclopedia of Indianapolis}}</ref> After attending Butler University,<ref name="IndyJean" /> she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago, where her roommate was novelist Marguerite Young.<ref name=":0" /> She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1943.<ref name="PoetFoundJean">{{cite web |title=jean-garrigue |url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jean-garrigue |accessdate=26 October 2022 |website=poetryfoundation.com }}</ref><ref name=":0" />
She changed her name to Jean Garrigue in 1940, bringing the name closer to its original French spelling, and making it more gender-ambiguous.<ref name=":0" /> Garrigue moved to New York City and spent most of her life in Manhattan,<ref name="JeanNYT" /> aside from her teaching engagements and travels throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.
In 1971, Garrigue was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.<ref name="JeanNYT" />
She died at the Massachusetts General Hospital on December 27, 1972; her funeral was held at the Appleton chapel of Memorial Church at Harvard University.<ref name="JeanNYT"/>
==Influences and notable relationships==
Garrigue claimed Chopin, Keats, and Proust as early influences and she admired the English poets Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and W. B. Yeats.<ref name="JeanGarrigueBucks">{{cite web |title=Jean Garrigue |url=https://bucksco.michenerartmuseum.org/artists/jean-garrigue |accessdate=26 October 2022 |website=Bucks County Artists Database |publisher=Michener Art Museum}}</ref>
After meeting at Yaddo in 1949, Garrigue maintained a relationship with Josephine Herbst that lasted until Herbst died in 1969.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cook |first=Richard M. |title=Alfred Kazin : a biography |date=2007 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=978-0-300-14504-5 |location=New Haven |pages=147 |oclc=608649879}}</ref><ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Langer |first=Elinor |title=Josephine Herbst, the Story She Could Never Tell |publisher=Little Brown & Company |year=1984 |isbn=9780316513999}}</ref> The two exchanged thousands of letters over the years, and Garrigue frequently stayed at Herbst's farm in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. Garrigue also exchanged letters with Marianne Moore and Delmore Schwartz.<ref name=":0" />
==Works==
Garrigue was first published in 1941 by ''The Kenyon Review''<ref name=":0" /> while she worked for ''Collier's'' as a researcher, edited a United States Organizations (U.S.O.) publication during World War II, and served as an assistant editor of an aeronautical magazine, ''The Flying Cadet''.<ref name=":0" />
In 1944, James Laughlin, poet and publisher, included her collection ''Thirty-Six Poems and a Few Songs'' in the third series of his New Directions collection, ''Five Young American Poets'', along with breakout poets like John Frederick Nims and Tennessee Williams.<ref name=":0" />
Garrigue began teaching poetry and creative writing courses in the 1950s and continued writing poetry, publishing ''The Monument Rose'' in 1953 and ''A Walk by Villa d'Este'' in 1959. She held a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Paris in 1954, and in 1960, she was a member of the Guggenheim Fellowship.<ref name="JeanNYT" />
In the 1960s, Garrigue published collections including ''Country Without Maps'' (in 1964) and ''New and Selected Poems'' (in 1967). She published a critical study of Marianne Moore in 1965 and a prose publication, ''Essays and Prose Poems'', in 1970.<ref>{{Cite book |title=The Oxford companion to twentieth-century literature in English |date=1996 |publisher=Oxford University Press |others=Jenny Stringer |isbn=978-0-19-151647-4 |location=Oxford |pages=242 |oclc=435804110}}</ref> She also contributed to several publications, including ''The New Leader'', ''The New Republic'', ''Saturday Review of Literature'', ''The Kenyon Review'', ''Tomorrow'', ''Botteghe Oscure'', ''Poetry'', ''Commentary'', ''Arts'' ''Magazine'', and the ''New York Herald Tribune''.<ref name="EncycloJean" />
Garrigue received awards for her works; ''The Kenyon Review'' awarded her two of their first prizes, one for a 1944 short story and the other for her 1966 novella ''The Animal Hotel'', which George Plimpton claims<ref>{{Cite news |last=Plimpton |first=George |date=1981 |title=The Paris Review Sketchbook |language=en |volume=Spring 1981 |issue=79 |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3263/the-paris-review-sketchbook-george-plimpton-norman-mailer |access-date=2023-01-03 |issn=0031-2037}}</ref> was based on people Herbst met while staying at the Hotel Helvetia in Paris but was more likely based on Garrigue's stays at Erwinna with Herbst.<ref name=":1" /> She was nominated for a National Book award for ''Country Without Maps''.<ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last=Upton |first=Lee |title=Jean Garrigue : a poetics of plenitude |date=1991 |publisher=Fairleigh Dickinson University Press |isbn=0-8386-3397-8 |location=Rutherford [N.J.] |pages=13 |oclc=22111501}}</ref> She was also awarded and honored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Museum, National Academy of Arts and Letters, ''The Hudson Review'', and Radcliffe Institute.
Garrigue was a teacher of English, creative writing, and poetry at several different universities, including the University of Iowa, Bard College, Queen's College, the New School, the University of Colorado, Smith College, and the University of Washington. Along with teaching, Garrigue was poet-in-residence for several institutions, including the University of California, Riverside, where she was resident in the Spring of 1972; she taught at Rhode Island College that fall until her health entered terminal decline.<ref name="JeanNYT" />
Garrigue's poems were published posthumously in ''Studies for an Actress and Other Poems'' in 1973, which included her poem "The Grand Canyon."
==Reception==
Garrigue's works were well-received and praised by her contemporaries, including John Ashbery,<ref name=":0" /> but her work has not received the same attention since her death,<ref name="PoetFoundJean"/> which Alfred Kazin described as one of the literary mysteries of the twentieth century.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Hart|first1=James D.|last2=Leininger|first2=Phillip W.|date=1995-01-01|title=The Oxford Companion to American Literature|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195065480.001.0001|doi=10.1093/acref/9780195065480.001.0001|isbn=978-0-19-506548-0 |url-access=subscription}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=August |first=Bonne |date=1989-12-01 |title=Vision and revision: examining Jean Garrigue's working papers |url=https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&issn=00183644&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA132973211&sid=googleScholar&linkaccess=abs |journal=Hollins Critic |language=English |volume=26 |issue=5 |pages=1–14}}</ref> A critical study of Garrigue's work was published by Lee Upton in 1991.<ref name=":2" /> The following year, many of her poems were collected and released as ''Selected Poems''. Garrigue's manuscript archives were acquired by the Berg collection of the New York Public Library, where they now reside.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Jean Garrigue Collection of Papers - NYPL Digital Collections |url=https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/jean-garrigue-collection-of-papers |access-date=2023-01-03 |website=digitalcollections.nypl.org}}</ref>
Of the intensity and challenging nature of her poems, Randall Jarrell said that her work had "the guaranteeing and personal queerness of a diary," and many others have remarked on its uniqueness and strangeness.<ref name=":2" /> Her poems often describe a process of seeing and present a tide of images and ideas associated with the object seen. Lee Upton remarked on her "restless eye": "the eye is as the self-pouring over surfaces and in effect 'reading' them," and many critics have observed the extravagance of her imagery.<ref name="AudaciousJean">{{cite journal |last1=Upton |first1=Lee |date=Summer 1987 |title=In Audacious Light: Jean Garrigue's Restless Eyes |journal=Soundings |volume=70 |issue=1–2 |pages=155}}</ref>
Stanley Kunitz described Garrigue as one "whose art took the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom. She was our one lyric poet who made ecstasy her home."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Kunitz|first1=Stanley|title=Kind of Order, Kind of Folly|url=https://archive.org/details/kindoforderkindo00kuni|url-access=registration|date=1975|publisher=Little, Brown|location=Boston|page=[https://archive.org/details/kindoforderkindo00kuni/page/256 256]|isbn=9780316506984}}</ref> Bonne August wrote that "Garrigue is a 'difficult' poet, difficult in the formal demands she makes on the reader; difficult, too, in the demands she makes on her poetry: to take her past easy formulations, comfortable insights, or glib prescriptions, to the truth of a thing."<ref>{{cite journal|last1=August|first1=Bonne|title=Vision and Revision: Examining Jean Garrigue's Working Papers|journal=Hollins Critic|date=December 1989|volume=26|issue=5|page=1}}</ref> Jane Mayhall noted her drive to the "dangerously deep levels of self."<ref>{{cite journal|last1=August|first1=Bonne|title=Vision and Revision: Examining Jean Garrigue's Working Papers|journal=Hollins Critic|date=December 1989|volume=26|issue=5|page=2}}</ref>
Garrigue did not belong to a poetic school or movement; Theodore Roethke stated she trusted her poetic instincts more than any poet he knew.<ref name="AudaciousJean"/> Laurence Lieberman has said, "There are rewards to be secured in reading her best poems of a kind that can be found in no other body of work."<ref name="AudaciousJean"/> Harvey Shapiro wrote, "Her way with language was Mozartean, breathtaking in its ability to ring change after change on a theme, Mozartean bursts of language, never leaving the subject, enabling the eye to see, clearly and more clearly, while delighting the ear with sound."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Shapiro |first=Harvey |date=June 22, 1973 |title=The Journey Through a Poem |work=The New York Times |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/04/specials/merwin-asian.html}}</ref>
==Bibliography== * (Contributor) ''Five Young American Poets'', third series, New Directions, 1944. * ''The Ego and the Centaur (poems)'', New Directions, 1947, reprinted, Greenwood Press, 1972. * (Contributor) Edwin Weaver, editor, ''Cross-Sections'', L. B. Fischer, 1947. * (Contributor) ''New World Writing'', New American Library, 1952. * ''The Monument Rose'' (poems), Noonday Press, 1953. * ''A Water Walk by Villa d'Este'' (poems), St. Martins, 1959. * ''Country Without Maps'' (poems), Macmillan, 1964. * ''Marianne Moore'', University of Minnesota Press, 1965. * ''The Animal Hotel'' (novella), Eakins, 1966. * ''New and Selected Poems'', Macmillan, 1967. * (Editor) ''Translations by American Poets'', Ohio University Press, 1970. * ''Studies for an Actress and Other Poems'', Macmillan, 1973. * (Compiler) ''Love's Aspects: The World's Great Love Poems'', Doubleday, 1975. * ''Selected Poems'', University of Illinois, 1992.<ref name="PoetFoundJean"/>
==References== {{Reflist}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Garrigue, Jean}} Category:1912 births Category:1972 deaths Category:20th-century American poets Category:Bisexual women writers Category:Bisexual poets Category:American bisexual women Category:American bisexual writers Category:American LGBTQ poets Category:LGBTQ people from Indiana Category:Writers from Evansville, Indiana Category:Smith College faculty Category:Poets from Indiana Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:University of Iowa alumni Category:Writers from Indianapolis Category:20th-century American LGBTQ people Category:20th-century American women academics Category:20th-century American women poets Category:American LGBTQ women writers