Ken Brewer Remembered

Local coverage of Ken's death:

The Salt Lake Tribune's front page article.

The Ogden Standard-Examiner's electronic site features four readings of Ken's poems.

Jeremy Pugh's write-up in Logan's Herald Journal contains a generous sampling of Ken's work and Ken's thoughts on his legacy. There is no direct link to the story, so I've reproduced it below:

Poet Laureate Ken Brewer Dies
By Jeremy Pugh

Eight months ago, Utah Poet Laureate Ken Brewer wrote this haunting verse:

Death moves in one night,
crawls under the sheets between us.
Cold, I roll to touch my wife.
— “Living With Death”
07/09/05

The poem was part of a cycle he had written after his diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer in June of 2005.

Brewer died Wednesday night at his home in Providence, after a nine-month journey of pain, poetry, love, redemption and catharsis. He was 64.

Brewer wrote furiously from the time of his diagnosis. Two weeks ago, his wife, USU professor Roberta “Bobbie” Stearman, commented, “He says he’s going to go out with a pen in his hand and a poem on the page.”

His final efforts generated hundreds of poems, among them a complete manuscript called “Whale Song: A Poet’s Journey into Cancer,” recently published by Ken Sanders Books in Salt Lake City.

“It was important for him to feel that his writing about cancer, about death, was more than just an expression of his feelings,” Stearman said Thursday. “He wanted it to be helpful to other people. He wanted people to understand that there are different ways to handle cancer. People say, ‘He fought bravely,’ but he didn’t fight bravely against cancer. He learned how to get ready to die and how to do it with courage.”

Brewer was appointed Utah’s second-ever poet laureate in January 2003. The position, given to him by then-Gov. Mike Leavitt, had no official duties, but Brewer helped define its scope. In January 2005, he opened a session of the Utah State Legislature, musing wryly that he was the highest-ranking Democrat in the room.

The poet crisscrossed the state and region, participating in workshops and educational projects, offering readings and interacting with other writers, undergrads and schoolchildren. He was returning from a writers symposium in Cheyenne, Wyo., when he discovered his illness. The diagnosis came at a time he described afterwards as the pinnacle of his 40-odd years as a writer of verse.

“This happened during what was the most productive, my most rewarding time, as a writer,” he said during an interview in July of last year.

Death sits on the side of my bed/
skirt hiked to the hair line, says/
Hi handsome. Dance with me?/
No thanks, I say, not yet./
I’m just a man with pancreatic cancer,/
not a corpse. Besides, I’m married./
Death stands and straightens his skirt./
I’ll be back, marriage or not./
Then he stumbles on his high-heeled shoes./
Careful, I say, you’ll kill yourself /
trying to walk like that. But the room,/
empty, squinches up like cheap perfume./
Left alone, I admit I could become Mr. Bones,/
and do that old soft shoe shuffle, tap, shuffle./
My father did that at the end, bones in my arms,/
as I carried him to the car for Indianapolis and the /
big VA Hospital where he saw Death getting out of a cab,/
Nice legs, babe, you wanna dance? And did./
— “The Visit”
06/25/05

Brewer was born in 1941 and raised in Indianapolis. Growing up, it was athletics that were originally the key to a wider world.

“I loved high school athletics,” he said. “I was so out of my class socially and economically. That was the only road I had to having a social life in high school.”

After graduation, he was working at a flunky job in a candy and cigarette warehouse, pulling down $1.65 an hour, when a friend asked him to head off to college.

“For some reason I said yeah.”

At Western New Mexico University, Brewer was a nose tackle on the football team and a catcher on the baseball team. He was also an English major, and academics came to the forefront after two literature professors inspired the young Brewer. When he returned to school for a master’s degree at New Mexico State University, he met his mentor, poet Keith Wilson.

“He changed my life. I never had any official classes from him. I just started taking things to him at his office, and he was kind enough to look at them and help me.”

From NMSU, Brewer taught a year of high school in Las Cruces, N.M., and an offer drifted down from Utah State University. Like many Utah transplants, he meant to just stop by on the way to somewhere else. He said he fell in love with the country — mountains, canyons, rivers and the distinct seasons.

“I have loved this fall,” he said last October. “The autumn here has been absolutely spectacular. One of the best I remember. So I’m going to say that it was on my behalf.”

He taught for 32 years, retiring from teaching in 2003.

In our back yard, the apple tree and the plum/
sag with heavy, ripe fruit, their branches/
nearly to the ground in this late summer/
I am ripe with cancer that slowly blossoms,/
that spreads its weighty fruit through my body,/
such ripeness ends one season, promises the next./
— “Ripeness”
06/26/05

Brewer was primarily known for books of poetry written around a central theme or plot. He published nine books in addition to “Whale Song,” and a batch of nature poems — “the bestiary,” he called them — that go along with a series of small woodcuts by Utah artist Royden Card.

Prior to his diagnosis, he also completed a collection of poems that collectively spin a murder mystery set on the grounds of his former home in Logan’s Island district, where there is a 100-year-old wool mill used for production in Brigham Young’s United Order.

In writing “Whale Song,” Brewer said he worked hard to understand the illness and has struggled with the often-violent language of cancer. Words like “malignancy,” “invasion” and “battle” didn’t quite fit his pacifist mind.

“He was adamant about not using those kinds of terms,” his wife said. “For him it was the idea that you can accept this but that’s not giving in.”

Since the Vietnam War, I have opposed/
warfare of any kind by anyone./
Now I use the language of warriors/
to battle the cancer in my body./
I speak of killing cells as ruthlessly /
as I imagine any warrior slaughters the enemy./
Do I now accept that old argument,/
“But wouldn’t you defend yourself and your family?”/
Is that what I do with chemo and radiation —/
chemical warfare and nuclear warfare?/
Should I name this tumor “Hiroshima?”/
Should I name it “Verdun?”/
Or should I think of this medicine/
as instruments to heal rather than to kill?/
I try, but sometimes fail, to keep myself whole/
by patience, kindness, and thoughtful action./
I restore the balance of my life/
by eliminating what I do not need./
I do not need cancer./
Or do I?/
— “Dilemma”
07/08/05

During his last days at his home, Brewer lived in a necessary exile, the result of his fragile immune system. But he stayed in contact with the wider world through the Internet, e-mail and telephone.

He gathered closely with friends and family.

“You find out all the friends you’ve got, and I’ve got a lot of really good friends,” he said. “I guess this has given me a chance to really see the love and goodwill of friends and family.”

It was his decision early on to not keep his illness private, and he gave numerous interviews. Articles about his poetry and condition were published in magazines and newspapers around the region.

“I hope I’ve contributed something,” he said. “When you get serious about writing, that’s something you want to do. You want to leave something behind that people will read and respect — something that will engage them. I think I’ve got a couple of poems that might just do that. I’ve written literally thousands of poems, but I think I might have a couple that might be maybe worth people reading in the future. That’s all the poet asks. If you get one poem that lasts beyond you, what else can you ask? We are remembered that way. In a way you don’t really die. If you’ve left something behind, either in our families or the public arena, then whenever anybody reads something by you or says your name, you come to life again.”

What is the rhythm of death? Iambic pentameter?/
Or alexandrines with very, very longish syllables?/
Or the word “death” with its “th” pressed/
against the roof of a coffin, or “fire”/
that burns to “ash” and flutters/
from a plane, a cliff, a ship, a waterfall?/
What does a dead poet write/
if not free verse?/
What about the “fear of abstractions?”/
Closed or open form? Tradition?/
Cutting edge (Well, too late for that, perhaps.)/
What about audience, publishing, SASE?/
What about hand-written manuscripts?/
And starting with “and” and ending with a question?
— “Questions for My Oncologist”
06/24/05