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Outgoing Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin Confronts Illness As Just Another Journey

Rennie McQuilkin is stepping down as Connecticut's poet laureate.
Cloe Poisson / Hartford Courant
Rennie McQuilkin is stepping down as Connecticut’s poet laureate.
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Rennie McQuilkin was born and raised in Pittsford, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester. His mother, Eleanor, was a poet.

“I think you have to have somebody in the family preceding you as a poet, to tell you it’s OK to do, so you don’t think you’re crazy,” McQuilkin says.

Not only did McQuilkin embrace his mother’s passion for poetry, he has exceeded it by becoming one of the most respected voices in Connecticut’s vibrant poetry scene. He is co-founder of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival and was curator of The Courant’s monthly CT Poets’ Corner. He founded Antrim House publishing and has served as Connecticut’s poet laureate since 2015.

Illness has compelled McQuilkin to step down as poet laureate after serving three years of a five-year term. He was the state’s sixth laureate, after James Merrill, Leo Conelan, John Hollannder, Marilyn Nelson and Dick Allen. The Connecticut Office of the Arts is seeking its seventh poet laureate, who will serve a three-year term. The nomination deadline is July 6.

In December of 2015, as the first poet featured in the CT’s Poets’ Corner, McQuilkin had this to say about the role of poetry in the world:

“As the world descends into chaos, poets have a greater responsibility than ever to speak out against conditions that are becoming so intolerable the world must eventually be shocked into waging peace. Let us hope this shock of recognition doesn’t require unimaginable devastation! The poets and youth of the world are in agreement. They must speak out loudly enough for world leaders to hear while there is still time.”

McQuilkin also passed on curatorial duties at CT Poets’ Corner to Ginny Lowe Connors and has scaled back his work with Antrim House.

But he isn’t letting go of his poetry.

“I write one or two poems a day, sometimes three. They keep pouring out, about whatever seems to be going on around me,” he says. “I notice things more now that I feel I am mortal. Life is more vibrant and it is more necessary to get it out and write it down.”

Mortality

McQuilkin’s newfound regard for his mortality began in February, when he was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer.

“Male breast cancer is rare. Men aren’t as aware of that part of their bodies as women are. People say ‘stage four, terminal.’ I intend to prove them wrong. I feel more alive and interested in the world than I ever was.”

He and his wife, Sarah, are downsizing domestically, too. They are selling their Simsbury home, a 1780 center-chimney colonial on 7-½ divine acres: trees, wild shrubbery, a meadow where the tall grass blows rhythmically in the breeze, drop-in visits by bobcats, turkeys, families of bears. For 45 years, Rennie, 82, Sarah, 79, used their home and its surroundings as inspiration to make art: Rennie poetry, Sarah paintings.

The McQuilkins are looking forward to their move to Seabury, a retirement community in Bloomfield.

“It’s an artist community, some poets, some painters, some singers, some dancers. When Sarah walks in, she’s mobbed, she knows so many people,” he says.

Rennie McQuilkin is stepping down as Connecticut's poet laureate.
Rennie McQuilkin is stepping down as Connecticut’s poet laureate.

Hooked On Poetry

McQuilkin grew up the oldest of four boys.

“Everybody in the family was musical except me and my mother,” McQuilkin says. “At Christmas everybody played instruments. I wrote a Christmas poem.”

He became hooked on writing after a teacher who thought he was wild — “she said I’d have a collision with the law” — put one of his poems on the bulletin board. “That was very heady stuff,” he says.

He earned a B.A. in history at Princeton and — after a military stint between the Korean and Vietnam wars — got an M.A. in English at Columbia. He married Sarah, who grew up around the corner from him, and began teaching: Horace Mann School in The Bronx, Philips Andover in Massachusetts, a year in France, Abbott Academy in Andover, Mass., Loomis Chaffee in Windsor, Miss Porter’s in Farmington.

“I continued teaching, but I was a writer in my heart of hearts,” he says. He has since published 15 books of poetry, some of them with illustrations by his wife. He and Sarah have one son and two daughters.

Sunken Garden

In the early 1990s, when working at Miss Porter’s, McQuilkin got a call from the Hill-Stead Museum, just up the hill from that school. “They wanted to talk to me about the possibility of a poetry festival in their sunken garden,” he says.

It was wintertime. He made the journey up the hill.

“It was a February day. There was a blizzard. I saw the possibilities right away.” He co-founded the festival in 1992.

The first festival featured a reading by Hugh Ogden. Eight hundred people came. Ogden brought a bass player with him.

“Music crept in on its own and became an integral part of the performance,” McQuilkin says. The following year, a contest among high school poets was added to the lineup.

McQuilkin gradually moved away from teaching and went to work at Hill-Stead. Over the years, the festival has grown, has had fits and starts as a result of periodic financial difficulties, but soldiers on.

This summer’s five-evening festival lineup includes Eamon Grennan, David McLoghlin, Margaret Gibson, Molly Brown, Solmaz Sharif, Javier Zamora, Andrea Gibson and U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.

Through all the years, at every event, McQuilkin was there, watching his flock like a shepherd. He handed over the directorship of the festival about 18 years ago, but even those who don’t know his name know who he is.

“I’m the man in the straw hat,” he says, referring to his signature chapeau.

Poet Laureate

Tamara Dimitri, the program specialist for the Connecticut Office of the Arts, who is overseeing the search for the new poet laureate, called the honorary post “a position we cherish,” valuable because the COA is an administrative body that needs boots-on-the-ground representation in artist communities.

“We’re behind the scenes. We try to be out there in the field but we’re not able to be at all the poetry events in the same way that the poets who support one another can be,” Dmitri says. “The poet laureate is of the community, for the community, a voice of that community. It’s the same for the state troubadour.

As poet laureate, “there is a sense of joy from helping emerging authors,” McQuilkin says. “There are so many good people, such a vibrant poetry community in this state.”

McQuilkin will be a tough act to follow, Lowe Connors says.

“He is the spirit of poetry of Connecticut. When I think of that I think of Rennie. He has such great enthusiasm for poetry. He has mentored many emerging poets. If you hear him recite or read some of his own poems, you just hear his love or enjoyment for the art in the way he presents it.”

The state’s poet laureate acts as an ambassador of poetry, promoting, teaching, sometimes writing in response to current events. McQuilkin hasn’t done much of the latter, but he did write “Child of War” in response to the death of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian refugee whose lifeless body washed up on a beach in Turkey after his family’s inflatable boat capsized after being hit by a big wave:

They are fleeing.

they are fleeing.

they are fleeing the stench of war,

the empty space

where their homes once stood.

They are fleeing

with empty hearts

in boats too small

for the sea of grief.

They are drowning,

they are drowning.

Here is one, come ashore

at the edge of the surf.

He is 3. He is tucked in,

knees folded, hands together,

afloat in the womb.

He will not wake.

He is at peace,

the only peace the world

seems to know how to make.

“All poets are dismayed at the current state of the world. That crops up in everything we write even if it may not be what we are writing about,” he says. “I could write something about the turkeys parading on my front lawn. It’s not a political statement, but it is about the environment.”

Now, McQuilkin has a new poetry mission. He is curious about what insight he might gain as he goes through his cancer journey.

“It’s a wonderful thing to write about. I imagine it would improve the immune system because you’re so joyful from the writing,” he says.

“It’s an adventure, so intriguing and fascinating. I want to write as much about cancer as I can to help people in a similar position. I want to be the poet laureate of St. Francis Oncology.”