Welcome to Splendid Wake-up: a blog associated with Splendid Wake, a greater Washington DC area project that documents poets and poetry from 1900 to current day. Find more information about the Splendid Wake wiki at Special Collections, Gelman Library at The George Washington University.
The family of Myra Sklarew in cooperation with American University announces the life celebration of the remarkable Myra Sklarew.
The Washington Post has a extensive tribute to Myra Sklarewpo published January 29, 2025. Among the many things said about this remarkable human being is that she wrote poetry starting around the age of 7. Those of us who knew Myra knew she was accomplished in the fields of science and literature. The Post article also has a link to the Splendid Wake-up blog.
Elisavietta Artamonoff Ritchie Farnsworth, well-known and loved, prolific American writer, poet, teacher, editor, essayist, and translator passed away on January 13th, 2025 in Solomons, Maryland. You can read more of her obituary at Legacy on the Internet.
Lisa Ritchie was the collaborating poet who gave the name A Splendid Wake to Myra Sklarew's archival project that operated with a wiki supported by The George Washington University.
On June 28, 2025, a life celebration will be held for Lisa at her former farmhouse.
In this photograph taken in 1999, Karren Alenier (left) stands with Lisa Ritchie (right) on the occasion of Karren's book launch party (Looking for Divine Transportation) which Lisa hosted at her DC house on Macomb Street. Lisa's hospitality and generosity was well known in the Washington, DC area.
SORTING LAUNDRY
by Elisavietta Ritchie
Folding clothes,
I think of folding you
into my life.
Our king sized sheets
like table cloths
for the banquets of giants,
pillow cases, despite so many
washings seams still
holding our dreams.
Towels patterned orange and green,
flowered pink and lavender,
gaudy, bought on sale,
reserved, we said, for the beach,
refusing, even after years,
to bleach into respectability.
So many shirts and skirts and pants
recycling week after week, head over heels
recapitulating themselves.
All those wrinkles
to be smoothed, or else
ignored, they're in style.
Myriad uncoupled socks
which went paired into the foam
like those creatures in the ark.
And what's shrunk
is tough to discard
even for Goodwill.
In pockets, surprises:
forgotten matches,
lost screws clinking on enamel;
paper clips, whatever they held
between shiny jaws, now
dissolved or clogging the drain;
well washed dollars, legal tender
for all debts public and private,
intact despite agitation;
and, gleaming in the maelstrom,
one bright dime,
broken necklace of good gold
you brought from Kuwait,
the strangely tailored shirt
left by a former lover...
If you were to leave me,
if I were to fold
only my own clothes,
the convexes and concaves
of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras
turned upon themselves,
a mountain of unsorted wash
could not fill
the empty side of the bed.
Our beloved MYRA SKLAREW, a matriarch of our American literary community died December 30, 2024. She was a biologist, poet, and teacher. She was author of 17 poetry collections and many other books including her last A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania (published in 2020), an interdisciplinary book that combined prose, poetry and memoir. She founded the MFA in creative writing at American University and taught over 10,000 students. From 1987 to 1991, she served as president of the Yaddo arts colony. With support from The George Washington University, she was the founder of A Splendid Wake, the archival project that operated from 2013 to 2022 and whose purpose it was to preserve the legacy of poetry in the Greater Washington, DC area from 1900 to the current day. Her family is planning her splendid wake and we will let you know when we know. In the meantime, find the witty obituary she wrote herself that was published in The Washington Post on December 31.
Here is a poem by Myra Sklarew:
The Sunflowers of Umbertide
Before I go into the dark places,
before I enter
the tunnel of the past, before I climb down
into the pit where I kneel on the earth,
where those I once loved leave me a remnant
of bone, before their lost names scatter
to the wind, before the trees forget what they witness,
before for no reason at all a child is taken
from life, before before . . .
I stand in Umbertide
where the sunflowers turn their
bountiful heads
eastward, their buds still in circadian rhythm.
And I am warmed by them, my eyes fill
with their seeds and petals, florets in perfect spirals,
their golden offerings risen high on their stems.
I carry them in my arms, the entire field of sunflowers
from Umbertide, so the coldness of the pit
in the cold country will not freeze me entirely.
