Talking Together: Letters of David Ignatow, 1946 to 1990

In his letters, David Ignatow finds company and shares the news with them and now, with us, his new company of readers

The letters of David Ignatow reveal the poet in “company” with a community of writers as he shares with them the details and nuances of his everyday existence: the key acts of friendship and enmity, of good news and bad, of struggle, work, success, and failure that comprise a life devoted to making art. The letters also serve as a vehicle for Ignatow to express his views on a whole range of issues from writing, teaching, and editing poetry, to his visions of the self, death and the cosmos. But the key is “company”—the support system that helps sustain the poet and that enables him to help others.

One of the many things we may learn from the letters of David Ignatow is the power of the individual to affect another’s life, to help sustain and even change it.

David Ignatow (1914–1997) is remembered as a poet who wrote popular verse about the common man and the issues encountered in daily life. In all, he wrote or edited more than 25 books and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Robert Frost Medal, the Bollingen Prize, and the John Steinbeck Award.

Gary Pacernickis Professor Emeritus of English, Wright State University, and the author of Memory and Fire: Ten American Jewish Poet; Sing a New Song: American Jewish Poetry since the Holocaust; and The Jewish Poems.