Saskia hamilton biography

Saskia Hamilton (1967–2023) was an important poet whose future poems were sadly taken from us before they could be formed .She taught at Barnard College since 2002 (and Kenyon College before that) and died this week of stomach cancer. She was a highly skilled lyric poet as well as an expert on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Elizabeth Hardwick.

Hamilton’s poems are compressed, chiseled, and reduced to a core lyric expression. Spare, yet dense, her poems live in a state of longing. What is desire? It can be erotic, memorial, salvational, and fragmented. Sometimes we can evoke it, and sometimes we fall under its sway.

In “The Weight of the Inside of the Body,” the emotion of feeling in between, transitory, or over a threshold becomes a physical state: neither outside nor inside, a lamp that’s off and a “draft,” both wind and a preliminary version.

“The Kiss” uses stretched-out lines and a little hinge (“stone floor, / but”) and the other definition of kiss, “a slight touch,” to amplify intensity and change. The kiss is all the more thrilling for its implication in a domestic setting.

The indescribable mystery of “One Wiser Says to the Other Unwiser,” implies burdens or stressors (e.g. “to shoulder”). The imperative form and word “if” suggests a kind of inherited grief that can have a physical manifestation.

“Another Stupid Party” evokes the delight of noticing a person (an other) from across a room. This is like a feminine version of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 4,” and it ends with the anticipation of desire, a feeling sprung into action.

The bilateral nature of desire is perfectly reflected in this couplet. The lines, like the individuals, are separated. The poem is a situation for which there is no language: the feeling of wanting someone 10% different than they are, or than you are, and all that that entails.

Snow is implicit in “Consider,” and “narrow” is not an adjective, but a noun. The trees beco

Saskia Hamilton is the author of three books of poems: As for Dream (Graywolf Press, 2001), Divide These: Poems (Graywolf, 2005), and the retrospective Canal: New and Selected Poems 1993-2005 (Todmorden, Lancs., UK: Arc Publications, 2005). Her verse has also appeared in many of the most highly respected poetry journals, among them Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, Triquarterly, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review. Her Guggenheim Fellowship is supporting work on her next book of poems, Night-jar.

She has also edited two very well received volumes, The Letters of Robert Lowell (FSG, 2005; London: Faber and Faber, 2005) and, with Thomas Travisano, Words in Air: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (FSG, 2009; Faber and Faber, 2009). She had first begun work on Lowell in 1999 as a Bunting Fellow, researching his letters at Harvard’s libraries. Ms. Hamilton has also been a Dean’s Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2000) and an NEA Poetry Fellow (2007).

Ms. Hamilton received a B.A. from Kenyon College in 1989, and, with the support of a Beinecke Memorial Scholarship for Graduate Study (1988-91), an M.A. in English and creative writing from New York University in 1991. After finishing her studies, Ms. Hamilton held a number of literature-related positions, spending five years as coordinator for poetry and lectures at the Folger Shakespeare Library (1992-97), two years at the Lannan Foundation, as Associate Director and then Director of its literary programs (1997-98), and a year each teaching at Kenyon College (2000-01) and at Stonehill College (2001-02). All of these experiences enrich her work at Barnard College, where as an associate professor in the English department she not only is a highly regarded teacher, but helps in hosting readings and lectures, and directs Women Poets at Barnard.

Saskia Hamilton was born in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 1967, and earned a BA from Kenyon College and an MA from New York University.

Hamilton is the author of All Souls (Graywolf Press, 2023); Corridor  (Graywolf Press, 2014); Divide These (Graywolf Press, 2005); and As for Dream (Graywolf Press, 2001). She is also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and the coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

In a review of Divide These, Raymond McDaniel wrote in The Boston Review:

Hamilton’s writing has been called spare and delicate, but neither of these quite gets at the effect of her poems, which are delicate only in the way a suspension bridge is: neither is marked by unnecessary ornament or fragility, and it would be a mistake to regard either as anything other than rigorously tough.

Hamilton is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has worked for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She joined the English department at Barnard College in 2002, where she served as a professor of English, vice provost for academic programs and curriculum, and director of Women Poets at Barnard.

Saskia Hamilton died in Manhattan, New York, on June 7, 2023.

American poet (1967–2023)

This article is about the poet. For the song by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby, see Lonely Avenue (Ben Folds and Nick Hornby album).

Maria Saskia Hamilton (May 5, 1967 – June 7, 2023) was an American poet, editor, and professor and university administrator at Barnard College. She published five collections of poetry, the final of which, All Souls, was posthumously published in September 2023. Her academic focus was largely on the American poet Robert Lowell; she edited several collections of the writings and personal correspondence of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Elizabeth Bishop. Additionally, she served as the director of literary programs at the Lannan Foundation, as the Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum at Barnard College, and as an editor at The Paris Review and Literary Imagination.

Her work was recognized with awards such as the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and the Morton N. Cohen Award. She held fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Early life

Maria Saskia Hamilton was born in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 1967, to Elise Wiarda and John Andrew Hamilton Jr. Wiarda is an artist and therapist. When Wiarda was ages two to seven, she lived under Nazi occupation in Amsterdam. Elise Wiarda's grandparents were later honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel for housing and hiding Hugo Sinzheimer and his wife. Andrew Hamilton was a writer and editor,