Notes for an Obit

In his prefatory note, Phillips Ruopp writes that his first published poem appeared in Poetry Quarterly, London, in 1950. Only a few of his poems followed in print until 1993, when his first book of poetry, Names without Bodies, was published for private distribution. The present collection includes most of the poems in that book and many more.

As the title suggests, these poems are retrospective "notes"--shared mortality, as he calls them--written late in the writer's life. In telling his stories and probing his experience poetically, he speaks in several voices, from the opening elegy to the compressed comic irony of the book's title poem.

In the preface to his earlier book, Ruopp wrote: "It is the writing itself, the making of a poem, that satisfies some natural inclination of mine to give ordinary words a weight and intensity that is out of the ordinary.... Writing a poem is for me a kind of confrontation with myself. It is an argument about the truth, or untruth, of the way I see myself and my terrain."

Phillips Ruopp had a long career in college and foundation administration. He was involved in a number of international and intercultural initiatives, including the development of widely regarded institutions and programs. In addition to travels abroad, he has lived and worked in England, France, and the West Indies. He now makes his home near Tucson, Arizona, with his wife of fifty-six years, Frankie Ritter Ruopp, a former teacher and community activist.