FIRST WE NEVER THOUGHT it could last so long, and then we came to think it would never end; we were wrong on both counts.
In 1991, Georgia Review editor Stanley W. Lindberg announced that Judith Kitchen and Fred Chappell would be regular essay-reviewers of new poetry for the journal, each producing two substantial commentaries per year. Judith’s invitation was made on the strength of “Speaking Passions” (Summer 1988)—which leads off this book—and “A Want Ad” (Spring/Summer 1990), both produced during the time when we were “auditioning” replacements for Peter Stitt, who reviewed poetry for the Review from 1977–87 before departing to edit a new literary journal, The Gettysburg Review.
Fred supplied fine discussions through 1997, at which time he stepped down to give more time to other pursuits. Judith, however, kept going . . . and going . . . and going, even through many years of uncertain health brought on by two potentially fatal conditions. In late October of 2014, from an intensive-care hospital bed in Seattle, Judith made final revisions to “Da Capo al Coda,” her study of first books by five promising poets of widely varying ages for our Winter 2014 issue. On 6 November 2014, at the age of exactly seventy-three years and three months—she became in 1945 a “Hiroshima” baby—Judith died at home with her longtime husband Stanley Rubin close at hand. After Judith’s death, with Stan’s blessing, I added “Da Capo al Coda” to the book because it really does represent her “final” word in more ways than one. Also, to complete the record, I created an Appendix entry for her penultimate essay, “When the River Is Ice” (Summer 2014).
Across twenty-seven years, Judith wrote some fifty lengthy essay-reviews for The Georgia Review, with the emphasis on essay. John Stilgoe, one of the outside readers for this book, called Judith Kitchen “one of the two or three leading poetry critics in the United States and one of the five or so in the English-speaking world.” What Persists is aptly and accurately titled, because Judith did not dash off journalistic reviews meant to be held in mind only until another round of the same popped up from some other hand a week or a month later. Judith’s essaying of American poetry is always mindfully broad-sweeping and minutely particular, always so wisely and passionately crafted that it manages to speak engagingly and instructively to both expert and neophyte readers.
The Georgia Review and the literary world have been inevitably diminished by the loss of Judith Kitchen’s voice, and I am personally saddened that Judith did not live to see this book come off the presses. I had told her for years that I believed her essay-reviews deserved publication as a body of work, and when The Georgia Review and the University of Georgia Press reached an agreement in 2013 for a Review-generated book series I knew exactly what the inaugural title should be. In early 2014 Judith herself made the selection of pieces and wrote her introduction, and then at my suggestion she created—beautifully and effectively—the appendix that gives thumbnail sketches of all her other essay-reviews and is, literally, a vital part of the collection.
Judith opened that initiating 1988 study, “Speaking Passions,” with a comment from the literary critic Leslie Fiedler about Randall Jarrell (1914–62), widely regarded as one of the great poetry critics of the twentieth century:
Jarrell is everywhere the man who has just read something he loves or hates, sometimes the man baffled by what surprised him into admiration or exacerbated him beyond patience by its ineptitude; but always the man speaking his passion, rather than an embodied institution pronouncing judgment. He is resolutely unsystematic, committed to no methodology or aesthetic theory—responsible only to his own responses, hushed only before the mystery of his own taste.
Judith offered this quote not to compare herself with Jarrell but to try to indicate the kind of poetry discussion she loved and hoped to conduct; I repeat it both to claim that she achieved, again and again, what she hoped and to assert that she has been as vital a voice for poetry for her decades as Jarrell was for his.