What a simple lot we were, but she,
raspingly clever, kept us breathless,
our innocuous moxie cresting to order.
– Phyllis Janowitz, “The Necessary Angel”
Poet Phyllis Janowitz, professor emerita of English, dies
Cornell Chronicle
Aug. 27, 2014
Poet and Professor Emerita of English Phyllis Janowitz died Aug. 17 at Seneca View Skilled Nursing Facility in Montour Falls, New York. She was 84.
Janowitz taught creative writing and poetry at Cornell for nearly 30 years and served as director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English twice, from 1980-83 and 1986-91. She retired as a full professor in 2009.
Colleagues remembered Janowitz fondly for her generosity, sense of humor and creative talents.
“Phyllis was one of the funniest and kindest people I’ve ever known,” said her former student Alice Fulton, MFA ’82, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English. “She had a delicious sense of the absurd and a warm heart, an unusual combination. Her poetry exhibits these qualities; on the page, as in the world, she was an original. Phyllis’ work was brilliantly eccentric, and its singularity made it an important influence for me and for countless other poets.”
Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature Emeritus, said: “Phyllis was a wonderful presence, one of our finest poets and, just as importantly, one of the most generous people I have ever known.
“Writers can be self-involved and too concerned only about their own advancement. Phyllis, in her wonderfully zany way, celebrated everyone with whom she came in contact. No one was ugly or immaterial in her universe. We shall all miss her terribly.”
Born March 9, 1930, Janowitz graduated magna cum laude from Queens College in 1951 and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. She taught at Harvard and Princeton universities and came to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor and poet in residence before joining the English faculty. She was a former student of Robert Lowell’s and a longtime friend of poet and faculty colleague A.R. Ammons.
The author of three poetry collections, “Rites of Strangers” (1978), “Visiting Rites” (1982) and “Temporary Dwellings” (1987), Janowitz published her work in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and numerous anthologies and journals. Her national and international honors included the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America.
Survivors include her daughter, Tama, of Ithaca; and son, David, of Houston.
Memorial gathering on campus
A gathering to remember and celebrate the life and work of Phyllis Janowitz will take place Friday, April 17, at 11:30 a.m. in the English Department Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. All are welcome to attend. Bring favorite poems, reminiscences, testimonials and any other offerings you wish, or come to listen. If you plan to attend, please email Victoria Brevetti.
Phyllis Janowitz
March 9, 1930 – August 17, 2014
Phyllis Janowitz was born in New York, N.Y., to Lillian Reiner and Morris Winer. Her mother worked as a homemaker and in retail sales, and her father was a police officer. She grew up with an older sister, Ruth Winer, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. In 1951,she graduated magna cum laude from Queens College and married Julian Janowitz, a psychiatrist. During her eleven year marriage, Phyllis lived in San Francisco and Amherst, Massachusetts. In the 1960s she began writing poetry and was awarded a graduate fellowship to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied with Robert Lowell, among others.
After receiving an MFA in 1968, she spent two years in Israel with her daughter Tama and son David. Upon her return to the U.S., Phyllis was twice made a Fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. In 1978, Elizabeth Bishop selected her book Rites of Strangers for the Associated Writing Programs Poetry Prize. This was the first of many honors Phyllis received for her poetry, including a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Phyllis taught at Princeton, Harvard, and a number of other institutions before coming to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor. In 1982, Maxine Kumin selected her second book, Visiting Rites, for publication by Princeton University Press. The book received critical acclaim and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 1983. It has been reissued as part of the Princeton Legacy Library series. In Visiting Rites, Janowitz expands upon earlier themes of isolation and identity to include poems about rituals of aging, communion, and confining cultural roles. She was tenured in 1986, and her third book, Temporary Dwellings, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 1988. A fourth collection, Truck With Marvelous Creatures,remains unpublished. Her poems appeared in the most distinguished literary venues, such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. Phyllis was promoted to full professor in 1992, and 29 of her 39 years of teaching were devoted to Cornell students. She directed the creative writing program from 1980 to 1983 and from 1986 to 1991. In 2009, she retired from teaching and was granted emerita status.
A colleague who once asked Phyllis if she had models, antecedents, other poets who were “sort of like her,” remembers that she looked serious and answered quickly, as if to dispense with discussion: “No one.” This was not a statement of grandiosity or defense. Her work was singular. The world, with all its heartbreaks and humors, assumed a phantasmagoric vividness in her poems, which resemble a blend of Sylvia Plath and Samuel Beckett, leavened by a helping of the absurd. The lines are bright with surface; the comedy tinged with tragedy; the sardonic wit deepened by empathy. In her poetry, as in her life, Phyllis evinced an unwavering generosity.
Her poems were musical and intricate, but she remained open to all literary possibilities. For her, all of the arts were interconnected, and she celebrated poetry’s ability to ennoble and democratize.
Phyllis began writing during the second wave of feminism, and many of her poems center on the difficulties faced by women as mothers and as breadwinners. The limitations of traditional maleroles are treated with equal discernment in poems that recount the yearnings of men who “wear their simple birthrights like / shiny gold watches on long gold chains.” A review in The Times Literary Supplement praised Visiting Rites for being “little affected by neo-Romantic narcissism” or “Oedipal influence-anxiety.” The Michigan Quarterly deemed Janowitz “a student of survivors and of those who ask more of life, despite the slim chances of receiving the desired plenitude,” and cited Visiting Rites as “one of the few recent poetry books that does justice to our helplessness and resilience.” Of Phyllis’s third book, a review in Prairie Schooner notes “The humor, the word-play, and the sheer energy of the language in Temporary Dwellings are infectious and invigorating. They are at once so human and humanizing….”
Although her work was celebrated, Phyllis’s humility and sensitivity probably proved a hindrance rather than asset in a literary culture that tends to reward self-promotion and networking. The density and originality of her unpublished fourth book set it apart from the dominant modes of the day. As on the page, so in the world. Phyllis’s self-effacing manner might have allowed her to float under the radar in the English department were it not for her elegant, quirky sense of style, which could take the form of winklepicker shoes or vintage cashmere coats. A little dog often trotted alongside her wearing a matching outfit.
In person she might be reticent, but on stage Phyllis was mesmerizing. Her public readings of her work were unconventional delights of music, costume, and dramaturgy. A colleague recalls the first time she heard Phyllis read, in 1989: “A large boombox stood on a chair to the side of her. After reading a couple of poems Phyllis approached the machine almost delicately, leaning down as if to consult it. She pushed a button and out came circus music. While this briefly played, she regarded her audience with what I would come to recognize as the quintessential Phyllis look: a little smile suffused with wonder, humor, wisdom, love, a look that said, modestly, ‘How can this be?’ and ‘This must be.’ When she pushed the button again, the music stopped and she read another poem. And so it went, throughout the reading. This was a strange, exhilarating synchronicity that seemed logical in the fantastical way that poetry means to be, operating on terms beyond logic, lifting understanding beyond the words and hitting the heart in a way the heart comprehends. The audience was ecstatic throughout. For Phyllis this was not a show, a ruse, a trick, but an essential act: that was the major amazement. All the same, she had a bit of the old Vaudevillian in her and knew how to hold, surprise, thrill, and educate her audience. She had the power to turn the world out once again as brand new and wholly astounding.”
The greatest teachers offer something more than knowledge, and Phyllis enacted the most capacious possibilities of what a mentor could be. She was a steadfast advocate for her students,generously helping them toward professional goals and offering advice through personal dilemmas. She corresponded with many long after they’d graduated, attended their weddings, took them to lunch when they came to town. She nurtured, championed and even sheltered students in her home as a matter of course. In class, she brought an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, the arts, and cultural studies to her textual analyses — for she was no respecter of divisions. As a colleague, she quieted rather than concocted drama, a blessing in any situation
but especially when departmental personalities and politics threatened to implode.
Maya Angelou noted that “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Phyllis made others feel accompanied: less alone and more alive. She was funny and fearlessly willing to fight for her beliefs, which were
expressed with a wit that recognized and forgave human foibles. The audacity and élan that critics prized in her work allowed her to turn ordinary — even dreary — events into memorable adventures. She also was a headspring of pithy apercus. "Another last straw," she’d sigh in the
face of adversity. “The possibilities are not infinite, they are yours.” Or as she said to a frightened colleague, “You are perfectly perfect.” In Phyllis’s world, “all weeds were regal.”
“Are there //…no monasteries for a heretic?” she wondered in a poem. She was the least calculating writer imaginable, one who never allowed her core values — at times quite
inconvenient ones — to be subverted by literary politics. Her autobiographical poem “Cells,” ends with a daughter who glimpses some graffiti from a train after visiting her dying father: The word love, read in a jolt of wheels.
Astonishing. Ineludible. Like a blissful couple, joined at the chest, thighs, knees, kissing in the doorway you’re trying to exit through.
The corridors of Goldwin Smith Hall are long and narrow. We see approaching figures from a distance and there is time for a constellation of emotions to gather as our paths converge. In these halls, Phyllis appeared as an unlikely apparition: oracle, witness, shaman, fellow traveler,
revisionary mother goddess. The speaker of her poem “Birthday” describes her disorientation when separated from her mother on a mythic subway trip: She has taken an escalator down to where I can no longer see her…I’m afraid without her I will lose gloves, manuscripts, even the map of my destination in the dim chambers underground.
Generations of students and colleagues will cherish Phyllis’s guidance. She will be remembered with abiding gratitude and affection, for there never was a more brilliantly original and endearing poet, teacher, or friend.
--Alice Fulton, chair; Kenneth A. McClane, Maureen McCoy
Cornell University Faculty Memorial Statement
raspingly clever, kept us breathless,
our innocuous moxie cresting to order.
– Phyllis Janowitz, “The Necessary Angel”
Poet Phyllis Janowitz, professor emerita of English, dies
Cornell Chronicle
Aug. 27, 2014
Poet and Professor Emerita of English Phyllis Janowitz died Aug. 17 at Seneca View Skilled Nursing Facility in Montour Falls, New York. She was 84.
Janowitz taught creative writing and poetry at Cornell for nearly 30 years and served as director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English twice, from 1980-83 and 1986-91. She retired as a full professor in 2009.
Colleagues remembered Janowitz fondly for her generosity, sense of humor and creative talents.
“Phyllis was one of the funniest and kindest people I’ve ever known,” said her former student Alice Fulton, MFA ’82, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English. “She had a delicious sense of the absurd and a warm heart, an unusual combination. Her poetry exhibits these qualities; on the page, as in the world, she was an original. Phyllis’ work was brilliantly eccentric, and its singularity made it an important influence for me and for countless other poets.”
Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature Emeritus, said: “Phyllis was a wonderful presence, one of our finest poets and, just as importantly, one of the most generous people I have ever known.
“Writers can be self-involved and too concerned only about their own advancement. Phyllis, in her wonderfully zany way, celebrated everyone with whom she came in contact. No one was ugly or immaterial in her universe. We shall all miss her terribly.”
Born March 9, 1930, Janowitz graduated magna cum laude from Queens College in 1951 and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. She taught at Harvard and Princeton universities and came to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor and poet in residence before joining the English faculty. She was a former student of Robert Lowell’s and a longtime friend of poet and faculty colleague A.R. Ammons.
The author of three poetry collections, “Rites of Strangers” (1978), “Visiting Rites” (1982) and “Temporary Dwellings” (1987), Janowitz published her work in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and numerous anthologies and journals. Her national and international honors included the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America.
Survivors include her daughter, Tama, of Ithaca; and son, David, of Houston.
Memorial gathering on campus
A gathering to remember and celebrate the life and work of Phyllis Janowitz will take place Friday, April 17, at 11:30 a.m. in the English Department Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. All are welcome to attend. Bring favorite poems, reminiscences, testimonials and any other offerings you wish, or come to listen. If you plan to attend, please email Victoria Brevetti.
Phyllis Janowitz
March 9, 1930 – August 17, 2014
Phyllis Janowitz was born in New York, N.Y., to Lillian Reiner and Morris Winer. Her mother worked as a homemaker and in retail sales, and her father was a police officer. She grew up with an older sister, Ruth Winer, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. In 1951,she graduated magna cum laude from Queens College and married Julian Janowitz, a psychiatrist. During her eleven year marriage, Phyllis lived in San Francisco and Amherst, Massachusetts. In the 1960s she began writing poetry and was awarded a graduate fellowship to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied with Robert Lowell, among others.
After receiving an MFA in 1968, she spent two years in Israel with her daughter Tama and son David. Upon her return to the U.S., Phyllis was twice made a Fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. In 1978, Elizabeth Bishop selected her book Rites of Strangers for the Associated Writing Programs Poetry Prize. This was the first of many honors Phyllis received for her poetry, including a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Phyllis taught at Princeton, Harvard, and a number of other institutions before coming to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor. In 1982, Maxine Kumin selected her second book, Visiting Rites, for publication by Princeton University Press. The book received critical acclaim and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 1983. It has been reissued as part of the Princeton Legacy Library series. In Visiting Rites, Janowitz expands upon earlier themes of isolation and identity to include poems about rituals of aging, communion, and confining cultural roles. She was tenured in 1986, and her third book, Temporary Dwellings, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 1988. A fourth collection, Truck With Marvelous Creatures,remains unpublished. Her poems appeared in the most distinguished literary venues, such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. Phyllis was promoted to full professor in 1992, and 29 of her 39 years of teaching were devoted to Cornell students. She directed the creative writing program from 1980 to 1983 and from 1986 to 1991. In 2009, she retired from teaching and was granted emerita status.
A colleague who once asked Phyllis if she had models, antecedents, other poets who were “sort of like her,” remembers that she looked serious and answered quickly, as if to dispense with discussion: “No one.” This was not a statement of grandiosity or defense. Her work was singular. The world, with all its heartbreaks and humors, assumed a phantasmagoric vividness in her poems, which resemble a blend of Sylvia Plath and Samuel Beckett, leavened by a helping of the absurd. The lines are bright with surface; the comedy tinged with tragedy; the sardonic wit deepened by empathy. In her poetry, as in her life, Phyllis evinced an unwavering generosity.
Her poems were musical and intricate, but she remained open to all literary possibilities. For her, all of the arts were interconnected, and she celebrated poetry’s ability to ennoble and democratize.
Phyllis began writing during the second wave of feminism, and many of her poems center on the difficulties faced by women as mothers and as breadwinners. The limitations of traditional maleroles are treated with equal discernment in poems that recount the yearnings of men who “wear their simple birthrights like / shiny gold watches on long gold chains.” A review in The Times Literary Supplement praised Visiting Rites for being “little affected by neo-Romantic narcissism” or “Oedipal influence-anxiety.” The Michigan Quarterly deemed Janowitz “a student of survivors and of those who ask more of life, despite the slim chances of receiving the desired plenitude,” and cited Visiting Rites as “one of the few recent poetry books that does justice to our helplessness and resilience.” Of Phyllis’s third book, a review in Prairie Schooner notes “The humor, the word-play, and the sheer energy of the language in Temporary Dwellings are infectious and invigorating. They are at once so human and humanizing….”
Although her work was celebrated, Phyllis’s humility and sensitivity probably proved a hindrance rather than asset in a literary culture that tends to reward self-promotion and networking. The density and originality of her unpublished fourth book set it apart from the dominant modes of the day. As on the page, so in the world. Phyllis’s self-effacing manner might have allowed her to float under the radar in the English department were it not for her elegant, quirky sense of style, which could take the form of winklepicker shoes or vintage cashmere coats. A little dog often trotted alongside her wearing a matching outfit.
In person she might be reticent, but on stage Phyllis was mesmerizing. Her public readings of her work were unconventional delights of music, costume, and dramaturgy. A colleague recalls the first time she heard Phyllis read, in 1989: “A large boombox stood on a chair to the side of her. After reading a couple of poems Phyllis approached the machine almost delicately, leaning down as if to consult it. She pushed a button and out came circus music. While this briefly played, she regarded her audience with what I would come to recognize as the quintessential Phyllis look: a little smile suffused with wonder, humor, wisdom, love, a look that said, modestly, ‘How can this be?’ and ‘This must be.’ When she pushed the button again, the music stopped and she read another poem. And so it went, throughout the reading. This was a strange, exhilarating synchronicity that seemed logical in the fantastical way that poetry means to be, operating on terms beyond logic, lifting understanding beyond the words and hitting the heart in a way the heart comprehends. The audience was ecstatic throughout. For Phyllis this was not a show, a ruse, a trick, but an essential act: that was the major amazement. All the same, she had a bit of the old Vaudevillian in her and knew how to hold, surprise, thrill, and educate her audience. She had the power to turn the world out once again as brand new and wholly astounding.”
The greatest teachers offer something more than knowledge, and Phyllis enacted the most capacious possibilities of what a mentor could be. She was a steadfast advocate for her students,generously helping them toward professional goals and offering advice through personal dilemmas. She corresponded with many long after they’d graduated, attended their weddings, took them to lunch when they came to town. She nurtured, championed and even sheltered students in her home as a matter of course. In class, she brought an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, the arts, and cultural studies to her textual analyses — for she was no respecter of divisions. As a colleague, she quieted rather than concocted drama, a blessing in any situation
but especially when departmental personalities and politics threatened to implode.
Maya Angelou noted that “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Phyllis made others feel accompanied: less alone and more alive. She was funny and fearlessly willing to fight for her beliefs, which were
expressed with a wit that recognized and forgave human foibles. The audacity and élan that critics prized in her work allowed her to turn ordinary — even dreary — events into memorable adventures. She also was a headspring of pithy apercus. "Another last straw," she’d sigh in the
face of adversity. “The possibilities are not infinite, they are yours.” Or as she said to a frightened colleague, “You are perfectly perfect.” In Phyllis’s world, “all weeds were regal.”
“Are there //…no monasteries for a heretic?” she wondered in a poem. She was the least calculating writer imaginable, one who never allowed her core values — at times quite
inconvenient ones — to be subverted by literary politics. Her autobiographical poem “Cells,” ends with a daughter who glimpses some graffiti from a train after visiting her dying father: The word love, read in a jolt of wheels.
Astonishing. Ineludible. Like a blissful couple, joined at the chest, thighs, knees, kissing in the doorway you’re trying to exit through.
The corridors of Goldwin Smith Hall are long and narrow. We see approaching figures from a distance and there is time for a constellation of emotions to gather as our paths converge. In these halls, Phyllis appeared as an unlikely apparition: oracle, witness, shaman, fellow traveler,
revisionary mother goddess. The speaker of her poem “Birthday” describes her disorientation when separated from her mother on a mythic subway trip: She has taken an escalator down to where I can no longer see her…I’m afraid without her I will lose gloves, manuscripts, even the map of my destination in the dim chambers underground.
Generations of students and colleagues will cherish Phyllis’s guidance. She will be remembered with abiding gratitude and affection, for there never was a more brilliantly original and endearing poet, teacher, or friend.
--Alice Fulton, chair; Kenneth A. McClane, Maureen McCoy
Cornell University Faculty Memorial Statement
What a simple lot we were, but she,
raspingly clever, kept us breathless,
our innocuous moxie cresting to order.
– Phyllis Janowitz, “The Necessary Angel”
Poet Phyllis Janowitz, professor emerita of English, dies
Cornell Chronicle
Aug. 27, 2014
Poet and Professor Emerita of English Phyllis Janowitz died Aug. 17 at Seneca View Skilled Nursing Facility in Montour Falls, New York. She was 84.
Janowitz taught creative writing and poetry at Cornell for nearly 30 years and served as director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English twice, from 1980-83 and 1986-91. She retired as a full professor in 2009.
Colleagues remembered Janowitz fondly for her generosity, sense of humor and creative talents.
“Phyllis was one of the funniest and kindest people I’ve ever known,” said her former student Alice Fulton, MFA ’82, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English. “She had a delicious sense of the absurd and a warm heart, an unusual combination. Her poetry exhibits these qualities; on the page, as in the world, she was an original. Phyllis’ work was brilliantly eccentric, and its singularity made it an important influence for me and for countless other poets.”
Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature Emeritus, said: “Phyllis was a wonderful presence, one of our finest poets and, just as importantly, one of the most generous people I have ever known.
“Writers can be self-involved and too concerned only about their own advancement. Phyllis, in her wonderfully zany way, celebrated everyone with whom she came in contact. No one was ugly or immaterial in her universe. We shall all miss her terribly.”
Born March 9, 1930, Janowitz graduated magna cum laude from Queens College in 1951 and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. She taught at Harvard and Princeton universities and came to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor and poet in residence before joining the English faculty. She was a former student of Robert Lowell’s and a longtime friend of poet and faculty colleague A.R. Ammons.
The author of three poetry collections, “Rites of Strangers” (1978), “Visiting Rites” (1982) and “Temporary Dwellings” (1987), Janowitz published her work in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and numerous anthologies and journals. Her national and international honors included the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America.
Survivors include her daughter, Tama, of Ithaca; and son, David, of Houston.
Memorial gathering on campus
A gathering to remember and celebrate the life and work of Phyllis Janowitz will take place Friday, April 17, at 11:30 a.m. in the English Department Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. All are welcome to attend. Bring favorite poems, reminiscences, testimonials and any other offerings you wish, or come to listen. If you plan to attend, please email Victoria Brevetti.
Phyllis Janowitz
March 9, 1930 – August 17, 2014
Phyllis Janowitz was born in New York, N.Y., to Lillian Reiner and Morris Winer. Her mother worked as a homemaker and in retail sales, and her father was a police officer. She grew up with an older sister, Ruth Winer, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. In 1951,she graduated magna cum laude from Queens College and married Julian Janowitz, a psychiatrist. During her eleven year marriage, Phyllis lived in San Francisco and Amherst, Massachusetts. In the 1960s she began writing poetry and was awarded a graduate fellowship to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied with Robert Lowell, among others.
After receiving an MFA in 1968, she spent two years in Israel with her daughter Tama and son David. Upon her return to the U.S., Phyllis was twice made a Fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. In 1978, Elizabeth Bishop selected her book Rites of Strangers for the Associated Writing Programs Poetry Prize. This was the first of many honors Phyllis received for her poetry, including a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Phyllis taught at Princeton, Harvard, and a number of other institutions before coming to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor. In 1982, Maxine Kumin selected her second book, Visiting Rites, for publication by Princeton University Press. The book received critical acclaim and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 1983. It has been reissued as part of the Princeton Legacy Library series. In Visiting Rites, Janowitz expands upon earlier themes of isolation and identity to include poems about rituals of aging, communion, and confining cultural roles. She was tenured in 1986, and her third book, Temporary Dwellings, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 1988. A fourth collection, Truck With Marvelous Creatures,remains unpublished. Her poems appeared in the most distinguished literary venues, such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. Phyllis was promoted to full professor in 1992, and 29 of her 39 years of teaching were devoted to Cornell students. She directed the creative writing program from 1980 to 1983 and from 1986 to 1991. In 2009, she retired from teaching and was granted emerita status.
A colleague who once asked Phyllis if she had models, antecedents, other poets who were “sort of like her,” remembers that she looked serious and answered quickly, as if to dispense with discussion: “No one.” This was not a statement of grandiosity or defense. Her work was singular. The world, with all its heartbreaks and humors, assumed a phantasmagoric vividness in her poems, which resemble a blend of Sylvia Plath and Samuel Beckett, leavened by a helping of the absurd. The lines are bright with surface; the comedy tinged with tragedy; the sardonic wit deepened by empathy. In her poetry, as in her life, Phyllis evinced an unwavering generosity.
Her poems were musical and intricate, but she remained open to all literary possibilities. For her, all of the arts were interconnected, and she celebrated poetry’s ability to ennoble and democratize.
Phyllis began writing during the second wave of feminism, and many of her poems center on the difficulties faced by women as mothers and as breadwinners. The limitations of traditional maleroles are treated with equal discernment in poems that recount the yearnings of men who “wear their simple birthrights like / shiny gold watches on long gold chains.” A review in The Times Literary Supplement praised Visiting Rites for being “little affected by neo-Romantic narcissism” or “Oedipal influence-anxiety.” The Michigan Quarterly deemed Janowitz “a student of survivors and of those who ask more of life, despite the slim chances of receiving the desired plenitude,” and cited Visiting Rites as “one of the few recent poetry books that does justice to our helplessness and resilience.” Of Phyllis’s third book, a review in Prairie Schooner notes “The humor, the word-play, and the sheer energy of the language in Temporary Dwellings are infectious and invigorating. They are at once so human and humanizing….”
Although her work was celebrated, Phyllis’s humility and sensitivity probably proved a hindrance rather than asset in a literary culture that tends to reward self-promotion and networking. The density and originality of her unpublished fourth book set it apart from the dominant modes of the day. As on the page, so in the world. Phyllis’s self-effacing manner might have allowed her to float under the radar in the English department were it not for her elegant, quirky sense of style, which could take the form of winklepicker shoes or vintage cashmere coats. A little dog often trotted alongside her wearing a matching outfit.
In person she might be reticent, but on stage Phyllis was mesmerizing. Her public readings of her work were unconventional delights of music, costume, and dramaturgy. A colleague recalls the first time she heard Phyllis read, in 1989: “A large boombox stood on a chair to the side of her. After reading a couple of poems Phyllis approached the machine almost delicately, leaning down as if to consult it. She pushed a button and out came circus music. While this briefly played, she regarded her audience with what I would come to recognize as the quintessential Phyllis look: a little smile suffused with wonder, humor, wisdom, love, a look that said, modestly, ‘How can this be?’ and ‘This must be.’ When she pushed the button again, the music stopped and she read another poem. And so it went, throughout the reading. This was a strange, exhilarating synchronicity that seemed logical in the fantastical way that poetry means to be, operating on terms beyond logic, lifting understanding beyond the words and hitting the heart in a way the heart comprehends. The audience was ecstatic throughout. For Phyllis this was not a show, a ruse, a trick, but an essential act: that was the major amazement. All the same, she had a bit of the old Vaudevillian in her and knew how to hold, surprise, thrill, and educate her audience. She had the power to turn the world out once again as brand new and wholly astounding.”
The greatest teachers offer something more than knowledge, and Phyllis enacted the most capacious possibilities of what a mentor could be. She was a steadfast advocate for her students,generously helping them toward professional goals and offering advice through personal dilemmas. She corresponded with many long after they’d graduated, attended their weddings, took them to lunch when they came to town. She nurtured, championed and even sheltered students in her home as a matter of course. In class, she brought an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, the arts, and cultural studies to her textual analyses — for she was no respecter of divisions. As a colleague, she quieted rather than concocted drama, a blessing in any situation
but especially when departmental personalities and politics threatened to implode.
Maya Angelou noted that “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Phyllis made others feel accompanied: less alone and more alive. She was funny and fearlessly willing to fight for her beliefs, which were
expressed with a wit that recognized and forgave human foibles. The audacity and élan that critics prized in her work allowed her to turn ordinary — even dreary — events into memorable adventures. She also was a headspring of pithy apercus. "Another last straw," she’d sigh in the
face of adversity. “The possibilities are not infinite, they are yours.” Or as she said to a frightened colleague, “You are perfectly perfect.” In Phyllis’s world, “all weeds were regal.”
“Are there //…no monasteries for a heretic?” she wondered in a poem. She was the least calculating writer imaginable, one who never allowed her core values — at times quite
inconvenient ones — to be subverted by literary politics. Her autobiographical poem “Cells,” ends with a daughter who glimpses some graffiti from a train after visiting her dying father: The word love, read in a jolt of wheels.
Astonishing. Ineludible. Like a blissful couple, joined at the chest, thighs, knees, kissing in the doorway you’re trying to exit through.
The corridors of Goldwin Smith Hall are long and narrow. We see approaching figures from a distance and there is time for a constellation of emotions to gather as our paths converge. In these halls, Phyllis appeared as an unlikely apparition: oracle, witness, shaman, fellow traveler,
revisionary mother goddess. The speaker of her poem “Birthday” describes her disorientation when separated from her mother on a mythic subway trip: She has taken an escalator down to where I can no longer see her…I’m afraid without her I will lose gloves, manuscripts, even the map of my destination in the dim chambers underground.
Generations of students and colleagues will cherish Phyllis’s guidance. She will be remembered with abiding gratitude and affection, for there never was a more brilliantly original and endearing poet, teacher, or friend.
--Alice Fulton, chair; Kenneth A. McClane, Maureen McCoy
Cornell University Faculty Memorial Statement
raspingly clever, kept us breathless,
our innocuous moxie cresting to order.
– Phyllis Janowitz, “The Necessary Angel”
Poet Phyllis Janowitz, professor emerita of English, dies
Cornell Chronicle
Aug. 27, 2014
Poet and Professor Emerita of English Phyllis Janowitz died Aug. 17 at Seneca View Skilled Nursing Facility in Montour Falls, New York. She was 84.
Janowitz taught creative writing and poetry at Cornell for nearly 30 years and served as director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English twice, from 1980-83 and 1986-91. She retired as a full professor in 2009.
Colleagues remembered Janowitz fondly for her generosity, sense of humor and creative talents.
“Phyllis was one of the funniest and kindest people I’ve ever known,” said her former student Alice Fulton, MFA ’82, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English. “She had a delicious sense of the absurd and a warm heart, an unusual combination. Her poetry exhibits these qualities; on the page, as in the world, she was an original. Phyllis’ work was brilliantly eccentric, and its singularity made it an important influence for me and for countless other poets.”
Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature Emeritus, said: “Phyllis was a wonderful presence, one of our finest poets and, just as importantly, one of the most generous people I have ever known.
“Writers can be self-involved and too concerned only about their own advancement. Phyllis, in her wonderfully zany way, celebrated everyone with whom she came in contact. No one was ugly or immaterial in her universe. We shall all miss her terribly.”
Born March 9, 1930, Janowitz graduated magna cum laude from Queens College in 1951 and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970. She taught at Harvard and Princeton universities and came to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor and poet in residence before joining the English faculty. She was a former student of Robert Lowell’s and a longtime friend of poet and faculty colleague A.R. Ammons.
The author of three poetry collections, “Rites of Strangers” (1978), “Visiting Rites” (1982) and “Temporary Dwellings” (1987), Janowitz published her work in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares and numerous anthologies and journals. Her national and international honors included the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America.
Survivors include her daughter, Tama, of Ithaca; and son, David, of Houston.
Memorial gathering on campus
A gathering to remember and celebrate the life and work of Phyllis Janowitz will take place Friday, April 17, at 11:30 a.m. in the English Department Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall. All are welcome to attend. Bring favorite poems, reminiscences, testimonials and any other offerings you wish, or come to listen. If you plan to attend, please email Victoria Brevetti.
Phyllis Janowitz
March 9, 1930 – August 17, 2014
Phyllis Janowitz was born in New York, N.Y., to Lillian Reiner and Morris Winer. Her mother worked as a homemaker and in retail sales, and her father was a police officer. She grew up with an older sister, Ruth Winer, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. In 1951,she graduated magna cum laude from Queens College and married Julian Janowitz, a psychiatrist. During her eleven year marriage, Phyllis lived in San Francisco and Amherst, Massachusetts. In the 1960s she began writing poetry and was awarded a graduate fellowship to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied with Robert Lowell, among others.
After receiving an MFA in 1968, she spent two years in Israel with her daughter Tama and son David. Upon her return to the U.S., Phyllis was twice made a Fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. In 1978, Elizabeth Bishop selected her book Rites of Strangers for the Associated Writing Programs Poetry Prize. This was the first of many honors Phyllis received for her poetry, including a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Phyllis taught at Princeton, Harvard, and a number of other institutions before coming to Cornell in 1980 as a visiting assistant professor. In 1982, Maxine Kumin selected her second book, Visiting Rites, for publication by Princeton University Press. The book received critical acclaim and was a finalist for The National Book Award in 1983. It has been reissued as part of the Princeton Legacy Library series. In Visiting Rites, Janowitz expands upon earlier themes of isolation and identity to include poems about rituals of aging, communion, and confining cultural roles. She was tenured in 1986, and her third book, Temporary Dwellings, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 1988. A fourth collection, Truck With Marvelous Creatures,remains unpublished. Her poems appeared in the most distinguished literary venues, such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. Phyllis was promoted to full professor in 1992, and 29 of her 39 years of teaching were devoted to Cornell students. She directed the creative writing program from 1980 to 1983 and from 1986 to 1991. In 2009, she retired from teaching and was granted emerita status.
A colleague who once asked Phyllis if she had models, antecedents, other poets who were “sort of like her,” remembers that she looked serious and answered quickly, as if to dispense with discussion: “No one.” This was not a statement of grandiosity or defense. Her work was singular. The world, with all its heartbreaks and humors, assumed a phantasmagoric vividness in her poems, which resemble a blend of Sylvia Plath and Samuel Beckett, leavened by a helping of the absurd. The lines are bright with surface; the comedy tinged with tragedy; the sardonic wit deepened by empathy. In her poetry, as in her life, Phyllis evinced an unwavering generosity.
Her poems were musical and intricate, but she remained open to all literary possibilities. For her, all of the arts were interconnected, and she celebrated poetry’s ability to ennoble and democratize.
Phyllis began writing during the second wave of feminism, and many of her poems center on the difficulties faced by women as mothers and as breadwinners. The limitations of traditional maleroles are treated with equal discernment in poems that recount the yearnings of men who “wear their simple birthrights like / shiny gold watches on long gold chains.” A review in The Times Literary Supplement praised Visiting Rites for being “little affected by neo-Romantic narcissism” or “Oedipal influence-anxiety.” The Michigan Quarterly deemed Janowitz “a student of survivors and of those who ask more of life, despite the slim chances of receiving the desired plenitude,” and cited Visiting Rites as “one of the few recent poetry books that does justice to our helplessness and resilience.” Of Phyllis’s third book, a review in Prairie Schooner notes “The humor, the word-play, and the sheer energy of the language in Temporary Dwellings are infectious and invigorating. They are at once so human and humanizing….”
Although her work was celebrated, Phyllis’s humility and sensitivity probably proved a hindrance rather than asset in a literary culture that tends to reward self-promotion and networking. The density and originality of her unpublished fourth book set it apart from the dominant modes of the day. As on the page, so in the world. Phyllis’s self-effacing manner might have allowed her to float under the radar in the English department were it not for her elegant, quirky sense of style, which could take the form of winklepicker shoes or vintage cashmere coats. A little dog often trotted alongside her wearing a matching outfit.
In person she might be reticent, but on stage Phyllis was mesmerizing. Her public readings of her work were unconventional delights of music, costume, and dramaturgy. A colleague recalls the first time she heard Phyllis read, in 1989: “A large boombox stood on a chair to the side of her. After reading a couple of poems Phyllis approached the machine almost delicately, leaning down as if to consult it. She pushed a button and out came circus music. While this briefly played, she regarded her audience with what I would come to recognize as the quintessential Phyllis look: a little smile suffused with wonder, humor, wisdom, love, a look that said, modestly, ‘How can this be?’ and ‘This must be.’ When she pushed the button again, the music stopped and she read another poem. And so it went, throughout the reading. This was a strange, exhilarating synchronicity that seemed logical in the fantastical way that poetry means to be, operating on terms beyond logic, lifting understanding beyond the words and hitting the heart in a way the heart comprehends. The audience was ecstatic throughout. For Phyllis this was not a show, a ruse, a trick, but an essential act: that was the major amazement. All the same, she had a bit of the old Vaudevillian in her and knew how to hold, surprise, thrill, and educate her audience. She had the power to turn the world out once again as brand new and wholly astounding.”
The greatest teachers offer something more than knowledge, and Phyllis enacted the most capacious possibilities of what a mentor could be. She was a steadfast advocate for her students,generously helping them toward professional goals and offering advice through personal dilemmas. She corresponded with many long after they’d graduated, attended their weddings, took them to lunch when they came to town. She nurtured, championed and even sheltered students in her home as a matter of course. In class, she brought an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, the arts, and cultural studies to her textual analyses — for she was no respecter of divisions. As a colleague, she quieted rather than concocted drama, a blessing in any situation
but especially when departmental personalities and politics threatened to implode.
Maya Angelou noted that “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Phyllis made others feel accompanied: less alone and more alive. She was funny and fearlessly willing to fight for her beliefs, which were
expressed with a wit that recognized and forgave human foibles. The audacity and élan that critics prized in her work allowed her to turn ordinary — even dreary — events into memorable adventures. She also was a headspring of pithy apercus. "Another last straw," she’d sigh in the
face of adversity. “The possibilities are not infinite, they are yours.” Or as she said to a frightened colleague, “You are perfectly perfect.” In Phyllis’s world, “all weeds were regal.”
“Are there //…no monasteries for a heretic?” she wondered in a poem. She was the least calculating writer imaginable, one who never allowed her core values — at times quite
inconvenient ones — to be subverted by literary politics. Her autobiographical poem “Cells,” ends with a daughter who glimpses some graffiti from a train after visiting her dying father: The word love, read in a jolt of wheels.
Astonishing. Ineludible. Like a blissful couple, joined at the chest, thighs, knees, kissing in the doorway you’re trying to exit through.
The corridors of Goldwin Smith Hall are long and narrow. We see approaching figures from a distance and there is time for a constellation of emotions to gather as our paths converge. In these halls, Phyllis appeared as an unlikely apparition: oracle, witness, shaman, fellow traveler,
revisionary mother goddess. The speaker of her poem “Birthday” describes her disorientation when separated from her mother on a mythic subway trip: She has taken an escalator down to where I can no longer see her…I’m afraid without her I will lose gloves, manuscripts, even the map of my destination in the dim chambers underground.
Generations of students and colleagues will cherish Phyllis’s guidance. She will be remembered with abiding gratitude and affection, for there never was a more brilliantly original and endearing poet, teacher, or friend.
--Alice Fulton, chair; Kenneth A. McClane, Maureen McCoy
Cornell University Faculty Memorial Statement
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