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by Catherine Marenghi

This article is part of an ongoing series on poets and poetry with connections to San Miguel.

If you walk down Callejón del Pueblito, one of San Miguel's prettiest bougainvillea-lined streets, you might just cross paths with a certain woman walking her chihuahua. This long-time resident is Kathy Snodgrass, who was half of one of San Miguel's most iconic literary couples for more than two decades.

Kathy Snodgrass is an author, literary critic and translator. Her books include Luis Miguel Aguilar: Selected Poems, translated by Kathleen Snodgrass, and The Fiction of Hortense Calisher, a book of literary criticism. She was also a long-time literary critic for The Georgia Review, where she reviewed short fiction for ten years.

With her husband, she co-edited and translated works by Romanian writer Dona Roşu: Your Name,and Letters to My Mother from Her Emigrant Daughter. Her translations of Mexican poets have appeared in such journals as Poetry International, Poetry London, and World Literature Today.

Born as Kathleen Ann Brown, she was raised in Downingtown, PA, and studied at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, majoring in English. She later pursued postgraduate work at the University of Delaware, where she received her Ph.D. and became an adjunct professor.

It was there, while teaching at the University of Delaware, that she would meet her future husband, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet William De Witt Snodgrass (1926-2009), who wrote under the name W.D. Snodgrass and sometimes S.S. Gardons. He was known to his friends as "De," pronounced "Dee." (For the purposes of this article, I will refer to both writers by their first names, to avoid confusion.)

Kathy and De were a remarkable literary couple that left an indelible mark on San Miguel's poetic history, both individually and as a team.

Meeting with Kathy recently at her Callejón del Pueblito residence, I noticed her voice soften as she recalled her first meeting with De. She described their first encounter as a coup de foudre – a lightning bolt. He was thrice divorced and more than 24 years her senior. But the couple would share a deep 28-year union.

"He was unlike anyone I had ever met. Brilliant and erudite, tender and funny. On the face of it, we were an unlikely duo, starting with that age gap, but we fell in love with the same things. Like Mexico."

Like Kathy, De also was born in Pennsylvania, and both had impressive scholarly credentials. De attended Geneva College until 1944 when he was drafted into the U.S. Navy. After the war, he transferred to the University of Iowa and enrolled in the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, originally intending to become a playwright but eventually joining the poetry workshop – studying with the finest poetic talents of the day, including John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949, a Master of Arts in 1951, and a Master of Fine Arts in 1953.

He taught for 40 years at universities including Cornell, Rochester, Syracuse, and finally the University of Delaware – where he met Kathy.

The Bumpy Road to San Miguel

In 1983, Kathy and De left Delaware together to drive to San Miguel de Allende. De was on a six-month sabbatical. Instead of spending it at Yaddo, a well-known writers' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he often went for writing sabbaticals, he wanted to go to Mexico.

"These were pre-Internet days. We found a book with one paragraph on San Miguel, and it mentioned one restaurant. It was going to take 10 days to drive there.

"I remember our air conditioner conked out in Texas. We stopped at the Mexican border and got a Sanborn's map and Mexican car insurance. This was before there were toll roads or 'cuota' roads. The map told you exactly what you would find at every kilometer. We spent a night at Saltillo, and the map showed a route that it said was a two-and-a-half hours' drive.

"I thought, that's ridiculous; it's only 60 miles to Matahuala. We'll be there in an hour. Fifteen minutes later I saw the mountain – or rather, mountains – looming ahead."

Kathy described the drive as a white-knuckle experience: two narrow lanes and a sheer drop from the crumbling road's edge. To amp up the anxiety, the road was dotted with white crosses memorializing those who had met their death along the way.

"Unbelievably, some drivers created a third lane to drive down the middle of the two lanes. And everybody had to just move out of the way," she recalled. "It was a wild and woolly drive. We were so exhausted, we had to stay another night on the road."

Finally, they arrived in San Miguel, and Kathy described that first experience as "overwhelming": from the warm afternoon light to the mariachis in the Jardin to the bright blue door of the house where we stayed at Calle Recreo 108, across from the lavanderia.

They rented their first home from the late Patricia Goedicke, a writer who has won numerous prizes for her fiction and poetry. Her husband was Leonard Wallace Robinson, who wrote for the New Yorker and was book editor for Esquire Magazine. Although they never met their landlords, De and Kathy rented the home twice.

The couple started coming every year, initially for six weeks, but understandably opted for air travel. There were seven weeks between semesters at the University of Delaware, and after passing in their students' grades, they hopped on a plane to Mexico.

"Instead of going to Yaddo, we thought, 'We'll make this our writers' colony. We'll come here.' And so we did," Kathy said.

"The San Miguel of the 1980s was very different from the town as it exists today," she recalled. "There were only a handful of restaurants, and there were no streetlights.

"You could drive and park absolutely anywhere. You could even park along the Jardin in those days. Everything was much simpler. If you knew someone coming to visit from the States, you gave them a list. We'd ask for things like herbal teas – things you couldn't find here. And we'd stock up."

The two shared a writerly life. "On a typical day, we would go to our studies after breakfast. Mornings were for writing. There were no distractions, no demands. Mornings used to be so much quieter in those days. That left the afternoons free for enjoying San Miguel," Kathy said.

"We met a lot of people, both artists and writers, who had started coming here on the G.I. Bill in the 1940s. Yes, some of them were getting on in years when we met them, but they were still vigorous and really alive, still working. More than one would say to us, 'It's a shame you didn't get here before it was spoiled!' They had so romanticized the early days here, because they were young then. But there was only one taxi back then, and only one bar anyone can remember – the Cucaracha. There was no phone service – you had to go to a central office to make a phone call.

"Literary events were few and far between, but there was a bimonthly Shakespeare reading that had been ongoing for years. One person would cast, another would bring cookies. During the winter months, San Miguel's high season, there might be as many as 20 people crowding a small living room.

"There were few venues for poetry readings when we first visited SMA, but gradually people started organizing weekly readings at Pepe's Patio on Mesones. Sometime in the 90s, De was asked to do a regular series, whatever he liked, at the Biblioteca Publica. He was tired of reading his own work, so instead he gave weekly talks on major poets – Frost, Eliot, Yeats, Whitman. He loved to introduce people to great poetry, and he read beautifully."

She remembered many literary friends in her years in San Miguel. They included Tobias Wolff, Joseph Persico, Robert Somerlott, Hal Bennett, Beverly Donofrio, Sandra Gulland and Tony Cohan.

When De retired in 1995, they were happy to find a place to rent on Callejón del Pueblito, where they would stay for six months of the year. The home was owned by Charles Kuschinski and his wife Lucina Kathmann, writers who worked tirelessly to help shape and sustain the San Miguel PEN Center. The home was often rented to writ saers, and it is where Kathy has resided to this day.

The Pulitzer and Confessional Poetry

W.D. Snodgrass's first poems appeared in 1951, and throughout the 1950s he published in magazines such as Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Hudson Review. In 1957, five sections from a sequence entitled "Heart's Needle" were included in Hall, Pack and Simpson's anthology, New Poets of England and America.

De's first poetry collection, Heart's Needle, was published in 1959. These were poems written in the wake of his divorce from his first wife, Lila Jean Hank, whom he married in 1946 and with whom he had a daughter, Cynthia Jean. Their 1953 divorce and the resulting separation from his daughter became a central theme of Heart's Needle.

The book won The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. Heart's Needle also earned a citation from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and finally the 1960 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The grief De felt over the loss of his child prompted the title poem of the book, "Heart's Needle," excerpted here:

 
I walk among the growths,
by gangrenous tissue, goiter, cysts,
by fistulas and cancers,
where the malignancy man loathes
is held suspended and persists.
And I don't know the answers.

The window's turning white.
The world moves like a diseased heart
packed with ice and snow.
Three months now we have been apart
less than a mile. I cannot fight
or let you go.
 

Dealing with deeply personal issues of loss and grief, the book was dubbed "confessional poetry." It was a label De despised. In a 1988 interview with Paris Review, De distanced his poetry from mere diary-writing and self-disclosure. He emphasized the difference between confession and finely crafted poetry: "It was a term I always disliked. It suggests something indiscriminate and personal that is not worked into art."

In his Selected Poems: Luis Miguel Aguilar, translated by Kathy Snodgrass, there is a poem called "The Parable of Marbles" (Parabola del Canicas) on this topic of shaking an unfortunate and unwanted label. The poem is dedicated to both Kathy and De Snodgrass. Aguilar writes:

 
Inside his book, as clarification,
He writes, "I'm not a confessional poet."
On the cover of that same book,
His editors announce,
"Although he's always rejected
The confessional poet label,
He's the founder of confessional poetry."

That's how we all live. Helpless to change it,
Someone, somewhere, decided on what you'd be.
And whatever at one time you were not
You will be, according to everyone, always.
 

According to the Academy of American Poets, confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or "I." It emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Confessional poetry dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry: death, trauma, depression, and relationships. Sexton in particular had started writing poetry at the suggestion of her therapist. She was a student of De's at a summer writing conference, and De had suggested that Sexton take a course with Robert Lowell when she returned to Boston in the fall.

Lowell's book, Life Studies, was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties and had a significant impact on American poetry. Plath and Sexton were both students of Lowell and acknowledged that W.D. Snodgrass's work influenced their own writing.

"De used to say of confessional poetry, 'It either reminds one of bedroom memoirs or something religious. I'm not interested in either one. And they always said, when confessional poetry is popular, Lowell is the founder; when it's not popular, I'm the founder.'"

"When De first showed his Heart's Needle poems to Lowell, he said, 'Snodgrass, you've got a mind. You can't be writing this tear-jerking stuff.' And De said, 'I'm sorry, it's the only thing I care about – losing my daughter in a divorce.'

"And then sometime later, Lowell wrote a letter to De and said, 'I'm taking you as my model.' So, there it is. Lowell took my husband as his model, not the other way around. But people forget that. It doesn't matter now. People just love to have names for movements, whether they apply or not."

In his deliberate and lifelong efforts to shake the "confessional poet" label, De displayed a wide range of poetic styles. In this vein, The Führer Bunker cycle of poems stands out. It was presented as a series of monologues by Adolf Hitler and his inner circle in the closing days of the Third Reich. It was first published as a "poem in progress" in 1977 and was finally completed in 1995. An adaptation of these monologues that De wrote for the stage was performed in the 1980s at the prestigious American Place Theatre in New York City.

Snodgrass also satirized the confessional style in a series of poems written in response to DeLoss McGraw's surrealistic paintings, a collaboration that eventually grew into a partnership.

Here is an excerpt from the Führer Bunker poems, showing a very different style from his Heart's Needle period. In this verse, he channels the voice of Adolph Hitler in his bunker, during his final moments:

 

    Tell me I have to die, then. You can't be
    Sure enough. My name on every calendar
    Relentless, every April, my birthdate
    Comes around. My death: my lickass general,
    My lackey. My Will scrubs it all out
    All of you, all gone . . .

"I go with the precision and
security of a sleepwalker."

    I pick my time, my place. I take
    This capsule tight between my teeth . . .
    Set this steel cold against my jaw . . .
    Clench, clench . . . and once more I am
    Winning,
            winning,
                    winning . . .

- From The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995)
 

The Last Time

De retired from teaching in 1994 to devote himself full-time to his writing. Over his long career, he published more than 30 books of poetry, essays, and translations.

Kathy described her 28-year partnership with De as an "unlikely success story," because of their 24-year age difference. Year after year, De often asked Kathy what she would do when he was gone. "He was hardcore realist about so many things. But it was a question I usually dismissed. I would tell him, 'We don't know what the future will hold. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.'

"After a while, the question morphed into, 'What do you think you're gonna do?' He didn't have to finish the sentence. We both knew what he meant."

She remembers the last time he asked. "It was only a few months before he got the diagnosis of incurable lung cancer. I was then around 58, and he was 82, and he was still in good health. This time when he asked me the question, I said, 'You know, I've been thinking about selling the farmhouse.'

The farmhouse was a rambling 19th century home in upstate New York, "in the middle of nowhere," with 35 acres and no neighbors. "It was really quite wonderful, but a lot to manage.

"I said I would sell the farmhouse and move to San Miguel and live in the Pueblito house full-time. We have great friends there, and I can volunteer and teach. And then there was a long silence. And he said, 'I'm jealous.'

"And I told him, 'We can do this together anytime, right now. We can sell the house and move to Mexico together, now."

But De refused. He had bought the farmhouse long before he met Kathy, in 1969, when he was teaching at Syracuse. Now it was 2008, and the house was full of memories. De couldn't imagine getting rid of it all. Kathy didn't have the same connection to all those possessions.

"I'm much more ruthless about getting rid of stuff," Kathy said. "But that was the last time we ever had that conversation. I had a plan, and it would take me five years, but I finally made San Miguel my permanent home.

"I'm grateful to him for asking that question through the years," she added.

W.D. Snodgrass died in his home in Erieville, New York, at age 83, following a four-month battle with lung cancer. "He was very brave, especially at the end," Kathy recalled.

"So, I was very blessed.

"He would always say, throughout his life, there's always a last time for everything. And it's true. For me, it's a reminder to keep my eyes wide open. To live in the present, in the here and now. Don't put things off, because nothing is forever."

There is a precious fragment of a poem that Kathy found after De's death. He was a perfectionist and never showed Kathy a poem that he didn't think was close to being finished. It was written when she was away for a month to look after her mother following a knee replacement. Here is that fragment:

 
Then, Love, if our sin has been
To like each other's company too well
To never quarrel and to count
Too much on each other's patience
We have deserved this little hell.
 

The Translator as Poet

While Kathy insists she is "not a poet," her exquisite translations of Luis Miguel Aguilar's poetry belie her modesty.. It takes a poet, or a poetic sensibility, to translate a poem from one language to another and create a new poem that resonates with the same power and lyrical integrity as the original. In her translations, she achieves the delicate balance between faithful translation and a skillful adherence to the poem's complex rhyme and form.

"I love translation, and I do love poetic form, like villanelles and sextets," Kathy noted.

For example, the first poem in Aguilar's collection is called "The Narrow Bed" (La Cama Angosta). It is a villanelle, a highly structured form that originated in French poetry and has endured through the ages in many languages.

A villanelle is composed of five tercets (three-line stanzas), followed by a quatrain of four lines. This structure provides a blueprint for the poem's development. The sequence creates a flow and progression in which the poet introduces and expands on ideas in a concise manner. The final stanza or quatrain brings together the various threads woven throughout the tercets. A rhyme scheme of a – b – a is followed in the tercets, and the final quatrain follows an a – b – a – a rhyme sequence.

In "The Narrow Bed," Kathy's translation elegantly plays with the language to create a perfectly structured and rhymed villanelle. It is a poetic echo of the original, not a word for word duplication. For example, consider these first three stanzas:

 
Es todo lo que sé. (Que es casi nada.)
Ella tenía una estrella entre los senos.
O así lo veía él, porque la amaba.

No se exigieron boletas de entrada
Pues cada uno andaba en su terreno.
Es todo lo que sé. (Que es casi nada.)

Es una cama angosta quemaban
Su historia y el temor; o cuandomenos
Ella pidió esto en él, porque lo amaba.
 

Kathy's English translation is as follows:

 
That's everything I know. (Nothing much at all.)
She had a star between her breasts,
Or, because he loved her, that's what he'd recall.

No entry fees: consent was mutual,
Both of them at home in their own nests.
That's everything I know. (Nothing much at all.)

In a narrow bed, though reciprocal,
They burned their histories and fears; or, at best,
Because she loved him, that's what she'd recall.

- From Selected Poems: Luis Miguel Aguilar
 

Note the subtle difference between the repeating parenthetical phrase "Que es casi nada," which literally translates as "which is almost nothing," and the translation by Kathy, "Nothing much at all" – a phrase that is more naturally English, and more poetic, while deftly preserving the rhyme scheme.

Also, in the second stanza, the Spanish "No se exigieron boletas de entrada / Pues cada uno andaba en su terreno" is literally translated as "No entry tickets were required / For each one was on his own turf." But Kathy's translation reads as follows: "No entry fees: consent was mutual / Both of them at home in their own nests." Not only does this sound more lovely than the literal, but it perfectly maintains the rhyme scheme.

Life After De

Kathy has remained active in the arts in many ways, including serving as director of the Academia Pro Musica, which provides music lessons in violin, viola and flute for children. For 40 years she has played the organ at the English Catholic Mass that now has a home at Nuestra Señora de la Salud. And she is most proud of her 15-year association with the San Miguel School of English, an all-volunteer organization that has given affordable classes to generations of San Miguelenses.

"It's fabulous to live here. The things we can do, all concentrated in a small area. You can enjoy a literary or musical event and then just walk a few steps to a nice place and have a drink or dinner with friends.

"I love the fact that Jennifer Clement and her sister started San Miguel Poetry Week here. De gave a reading and a talk at Poetry Week. He was in very good company: They featured world-class poets like W.S. Merwin, C.K. Williams, and so many others." [See related article on "Jennifer Clement: Daughter of Surrealism."]

When asked if she had a favorite poem by W.D. Snodgrass, she struggled a bit to answer. "I mean, I love poems like 'April Inventory' and I love all the poems he wrote to me. They're wonderful little poems.

"There was never what you could call a Snodgrass poem or attitude or theme. He kept doing new things. He was really restless, and he wanted to explore different forms, and to create his own forms. He just kept going outward. So, for that reason, there are a lot of poems that I love, some that are very dark, some are very light.

"He wrote several poems about San Miguel. Some are very sweet, like 'Birds Caught, Birds Flying.' Others are sardonic, like his poem 'Gringolandia,' which pokes fun at people who come to San Miguel to reinvent themselves. Or 'On the Street,' about a street mendicant who was rather aggressive:

 
Proud
of the meager Spanish
I could manage, I offered,
"No tengo cambio"
in excuse.
Peering up through lenses
thick as signal lanterns
frosted, long sunk underseas,
she shot out one claw,
snapping,
"Go to the bank, then,"
in good English.
Which I did.

From "On the Street," Not For Specialists: New and Selected Poems
 

"I distinctly remembered that encounter," Kathy said. "On the way home, I told De, 'If I were her, I'd have said, 'No need to get small change. I take large bills!'"

As a favorite poem by her husband, Kathy settled on "April Inventory," which is a contemplation on aging, a plaintive song on the passage of time, and an achingly poignant love poem. It is printed in its entirety here:

 
April Inventory

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces, true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

- From Selected Poems, 1957-1987
 

Kathy Snodgrass continues to thrive in SMA. Two years ago, after a bout with breast cancer, she realized anew how important it was to live in the present. Stroking her well-mannered Chihuahua, Milo, on her lap, she mused, "Milo doesn't fret about the future, but we know anything can happen at any time. I'm grateful for this day.

"Talking to you about the now-distant past, I can't help comparing then and now. I was 35 when I first came to SMA. Life was wonderful: I was a writer, a teacher; I was in love with the most wonderful human I had ever met… and I was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A whole new world had opened up for me and De.

"Forty years later, I feel essentially the same: life is still wonderful. I'm a writer, a teacher, and I was blessed to have spent almost 28 years with the most wonderful human being I had ever met. And I'm here, in San Miguel. Life is good."

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Catherine Marenghi is a local poet, novelist and memoirist who has been active in the San Miguel literary scene for more than a decade. She has published three poetry books, a memoir, and a historic novel. A native of Massachusetts, she has made San Miguel her permanent home.

www.marenghi.com

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