Prompt 292. Letters from Max

& the playwright Sarah Ruhl on art that enlivens and endures

Max and Me (2015)

Hi friend,

Recently I got a message from the wife of my late friend, the poet Max Ritvo. She was going through some old boxes and found a note he’d written to me after their wedding but had never sent. She wanted me to have it; she asked for my address. When I opened it and saw my nicknames scrolled across the top and read the buoyant joy in his message, my heart ached. The whole thing was so completely Max.

Oh, Max. Where to begin? Max Ritvo was a fellow cancer comrade and dear friend. When I first met him in the pediatric ward of Sloan Kettering, I was taken by his style: his spectacles, his thrift-store kimonos, the tattoo of the bird behind his ear that would rise like a phoenix whenever the chemo took his hair. Max was a master of words—not only in verse but in conversation. With our dear friend, the painter Melissa Carroll, we would often play a word game, where we’d all come up with a vivid and precise definition for some cancer-related term. We all tried, but he was the best at it—like scanxiety, which Max said was “like eating a pizza and not being sure if those are pepper flakes or small red mites.” He did that impossible thing of turning whatever plagued us into something beautiful and hilarious. He was the true light in so many fluorescent-lit hospital rooms.

Despite our unfunny circumstances, we laughed a lot, and we found so much solace in that laughter. Once, after we both had a really crappy week of treatment, we went to this restaurant in the East Village that we loved (but that no longer exists) called Goat Town, and we decided we were going to get properly drunk. We scanned the list of cocktails and picked the most absurd one on the menu—something wildly fruity. Again, we played our word game. I said the cocktail walked the line of high brow/low brow, like drinking a Capri Sun on a yacht. He said it was like being on the prow of a sailboat, but instead of being misted with seawater, you’re being sprayed with Axe body spray. Max made space for everything: the beauty, the terror. He was modeling that forever lesson of holding both in the same palm.

A final thing I’ll say—which will bring me to our guest essay and prompt—is that Max was an epic letter writer. These missives live on privately of course, in his beloveds’ email inboxes, in desk drawers, and in boxes full of keepsakes. But several years ago, his mentor and friend, the poet and playwright Sarah Ruhl, compiled their correspondence into a beautiful book called Letters from Max, which allowed Max’s delightful, surprising epistolary voice to enter the public sphere.

I first met Sarah at Max’s wedding, where I was a groomsman and where we were both invited to give a blessing. I’ve since had the honor of spending time with her and of seeing her stunningly beautiful stage production of Letters from Max. I even had the honor of reading one of his poems at the end. Today, in memory of Max and all my friends who crossed the river too soon, and in celebration of art and friendship, I’m sharing a few pages from that book and a prompt inspired by it, with Sarah’s permission. This excerpt contains Max’s best qualities in abundance, like his dazzling intelligence, his generosity, and his devotion to art. To meet my dear friend Max, read on.

Sending love,

Suleika

Some items of note—

• Our next meeting of the Hatch, our virtual hour for paid subscribers, is happening today—that’s Sunday, April 21, from 1-2pm ET. Our managing editor Carmen Radley will be hosting, sharing a poem that echoes one of my husband Jon’s favorite sayings: “I love you even if I don’t know you.” You can find everything you need to join here!

• For those of you who are new here, each Friday in our Isolation Journals Chat we share a small joy that we want to hold onto. This week I wrote about how, after a rare instance of oversleeping—before a flight no less!—I went from panic to total relaxation. To be buoyed by the chorus and to add yours too, click here!

Melissa Carroll, Max (2013)

Prompt 292. from Letters from Max by Sarah Ruhl

That winter, we pursued soup. And shared poems.

Max somehow got me to share with him my early poems, written when I was his age. I seldom share my poems with people. Emily Dickinson's envelope poems are to me the height of beauty—unshared, unfinished, written on envelopes—as partial as they are sublime, as hidden as they are revealed.

My plays get consumed by audiences in front of me; the audiences either laugh or don't laugh, clap heartily or not at all; the plays get reviewed well or badly; this was as much vulnerability, I'd decided, as one writer could absorb in one lifetime. The poems were private. I wrote them as gifts for other people—occasion poems, you might say, in the old-fashioned tradition. I wanted desperately to be a poet before I discovered playwriting, but once I wrote plays, I began to think there was a kind of equation for playwrights—indifferent-to-bad poets made good playwrights. The poems were a compost heap for the plays. And if you like your friends, you don't send them compost in the mail.

But Max asked for more poetry, and Max could be very persuasive.

In sharing our poetry with each other, I came to feel less and less Max's "teacher," and more his colleague and friend. I was certainly not the only teacher who had a close working relationship with Max. Max spoke often of the astonishing poet Louise Glück, who mentored him beautifully at Yale and afterward. Max would go on to charm scores of teachers who ended up asking for Max's feedback on their own writing.

That Max turned many of his teachers into colleagues in short order, as fast as you could flip a pancake, was not surprising. The transformation was immediate because it did not take long for a perceptive teacher to see Max as an equal. I was certainly not the only teacher of his to dissolve the formal boundaries between the teacher and the taught. And this reversal was not at all a lack of reverence for his teachers—quite the opposite. He would emphatically introduce me as his Teacher with a capital T long after he was my student at Yale. The transformation of his teachers into fellow writers was more to do with reciprocity.

Max's generosity could not bear to take without giving, could not bear to be read without also reading. Poetry was, to Max, a conversation. He didn't want to chirp his epic songs into an unsinging receptacle. He wanted them to answer back. He wanted a poem to answer a poem. He wanted his writing to beget more writing.

He told me that with the time he had left, all he wanted to do was write poetry. He was applying to graduate school in poetry. He asked me for a recommendation. I said yes.

January 18, 2013

Dear Sarah,

Your recommendation letters arrived. I am so deeply grateful to you. I nearly cried when I read the letter. Working with you and coming to admire you as much as I have from reading you, watching you, receiving the warmth in your human heart as well your literary heart, I felt a pretty fucking close to miraculous sense of joy to hear that the connection is mutual. You complimented my ear. Nobody ever compliments my ear.

Secretly, I am very proud of my ear. Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself, is dissolving. You are not. Maybe I am not? That's what your letter meant to me.

The cancer is very, very scary right now. It keeps changing the terms of the contract. I wept a lot today in the bathroom. I am now more terrified than ever of going back into chemoland, feeling like the chemo isn't even efficacious. I was starting to get really hopeful about my MFA plans, and the prospect of writing poetry full time. Now I'm scared I might not make it to that stage, or I will end up plugged into some experimental protocol after a semi-botched chemo attempt.

Thank you for your goodness and your kindness.

Max

February 16

Dear Max,

If it's poems you want, it's poems you shall have.

As promised, here is one poem I wrote. (Unpublished and largely unread but by my husband who I wrote it for.) How was your reading? I am having socks knitted for you by one Ms. Evelyn Love who lives on Pond Street. Let's make our dinner plan soon.

хохо.

Sarah

You know what a lee is; I don’t.
Behind a stone. No wind. Stop boat. A place.
Behind your back. My body. Stop the air.
Travel by stopping, full stop, just there.

A lee is a small word. Sail easy.
Lee and unlee, light is hot.
Rest here, a while longer on my
belly. A lee, a dry derry, a drought.

August: marsh sounds, marsh looks, a ferry.
Look for other words—lucid, pellucid
call a mind a pond? Call a pond a mind?
Lucid, penitent mendicants on a pond.

Words for clarity, words for light and heat,
words for charity—words for sleep.

February 17

Sarah, I know I'm poetry biased, but this made me shimmer inside. I want to write with this kind of glow, and this kind of penetration/purity (and intelligence) one day. I have read it out loud so many times. I am going to use sounds. I am going to read out loud more, and have words fall back into one another and into one another's arms!

The first stanza ... makes me want to play peekaboo. I can't even. It's moving—I want to move. I want this miracle in my life.... The elisions. The life. Oh God, Sarah, seriously that first stanza I could read a billion times.

I'm excited for socks, and for dinner.

Love, Max

Your prompt for the week:

Write about a piece of art that you could read, watch, view, or listen to a billion times—something that makes you shimmer inside, that makes you want to move and, with childlike wonder, play peek-a-boo.

If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

Today’s Contributors—

Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of The Final Voicemails, edited and introduced by Louise Glück, and co-authored Letters from Max with Sarah Ruhl; both books were published posthumously. Ritvo’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among many other publications.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee), and The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), among many others. She is also the author of the memoir Smile and a poetry collection, Love Poems in Quarantine. She is a recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant and the Steinberg Prize. She is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• The Year of Poetry, notes from the Hatch about the compounding delights of a poem shared between friends

• Carrying Complicated Grief, an installment of my advice column, Dear Susu, about how to approach a loved one’s writings after death

• My Year of Love, a photo essay of what I thought was the worst year of my life but was in fact so much more

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