Poet and singer Ruth Daigon to be memorialized Sunday, May 30th

Ruth Daigon was a much admired Canadian-American poet, who hailed from Winnipeg, spent many years in Connecticut, and gave her last decades to the San Francisco Bay Area and a poetry community that she loved, and that equally loved and embraced her. She passed away on February 17^th and her friends and admirers will honor her Sunday, May 30^th, 2-4 pm, at Book Passage in Corte Madera.

“Celebrating Ruth Daigon” will feature readings of her poems by David Alpaugh, Jack and Adelle Foley, C. B. Follett (the new poet laureate of Marin County), Lynne Knight, Jacqueline Kudler, Susan Terris, and Robert Sward. In addition, the organizers will present recordings of Ruth, who was a professional singer as a well as a poet.

I first became aware of Ruth Daigon while hosting the Coffee Mill readings series in the early 1990s. I was as much impressed by her poise and professional demeanor as I was with the power and tenacity of her poems, especially pieces that focused on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a subject that greatly interested me. Payday at the Triangle, Daigon’s homage was released in 2001, and stands with Chris Llewellyn’s book Fragments from the Fire, as two works that seriously treat the lives of immigrant and working-class women in poetic form. Both Tillie Olsen and Studs Terkel took notice of Daigon’s work, while book reviewer Mary Barnet said of Payday at the Triangle that “The smoke, flame, and terror are palpable in Ruth Daigon’s poems which tell the individual tales of persons involved in the terrible fire.” Some of these poems can be found online at www.forpoetry.com/Archive/ruth_daigon.htm.

At one account, Daigon published over 900 poems in literary journals and anthologies, and accomplished seven books of poetry in her lifetime. Her most recent collection, Handfuls of Time, was published in 2002 by David Alpaugh‘s Small Poetry Press. Alpaugh is one of the organizers of Sunday’s event.

Daigon received the Richard Eberhart Poetry Prize in 2001 and the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize (1997) among other awards. Aside from gaining a reputation for her poetry, Daigon was a valued member of the Bay Area poetry community, and helped to promote other poets by critiquing their work, writing book blurbs, hosting poetry events, and publishing them. She helped to organize the “Marin Poets Evening” featuring eight poets at Fort Mason's National Poetry Association, coordinated monthly readings featuring Marin poets, and was involved with the Marin Poetry Center and its Traveling Poetry show early on. For several decades, Ruth and her “Artie” (her husband Arthur) published Poets On, a literary zine that solicited work on a particular topic and then presented it in 40 issues for two decades.

Daigon’s creative career began in music. As a concert soprano, she toured with the New York Pro Musica group and performed with the Hartford Symphony. She had the honor of singing at Dylan Thomas’ funeral and she collaborated with W.H. Auden on a recording for Columbia Records. She described working with Auden, who came to rehearsals in “an unraveled sweater and old carpet slippers” as every inch a professional when she was interviewed for Lily, an online literary review.

Music was an integral part of her poetry writing and performing, and she was known to sing while giving a reading of her work. She said that “the sound and flow of my poetry, the rhythm, the cadence, lyric quality was given direction by my allegiance to music.” She advised others to “write to please yourself and not to impress others” and valued honesty, conviction, aliveness, and writing that was “fearless yet controlled” and “unselfconscious.”

Book Passage is located at 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. in Corte Madera, Marin County. For more information about this event, contact alpaugh.david@gmail.com.

Invocation

by Ruth Daigon

Let there be cool linen

and lovers resting between sheets

humming a small heaven between them

Let there be a settlement of snow

long green veils of rain

and radiant squalors

Let the pulse beat within us

rich as salt, hot as sun

giving time its edge

Let us steep tansy, coriander