Myra Sklarew, meditative poet and writing teacher, dies at 90
She wrote about science, aging and Jewish identity, in addition to co-founding an MFA program at American University and leading the artists’ retreat Yaddo.
Poet and writing professor Myra Sklarew in 2020, reading from her nonfiction book “A Survivor Named Trauma” at Politics and Prose in Washington. (Rob Howe)
Myra Sklarew, a poet and teacher who found inspiration for her graceful, meditative verses in the natural world, her Jewish heritage and her early years working with rhesus monkeys at a research lab, died Dec. 30 at a hospice center in Rockville, Maryland. She was 90.
The cause was complications from Crohn’s disease, said her daughter, Deborah Langosch.
Ms. Sklarew began writing poetry at age 7 or 8, sequestered at home with frequent strep infections in the years before penicillin brought an end to her isolation. She was still working up until her death, crafting pieces that intertwined the personal and the historical — the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the fall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — in a voice that was gentle yet precise, informed by her wide-ranging interests in literature, medicine, physiology and faith.
Reviewing her 2010 collection “Harmless,” poet Benjamin S. Grossberg observed in the Antioch Review that Ms. Sklarew’s best work had both a timeless authority and a “mythic grace.” He quoted from her poem “Laisves Aleja,” musing on late-in-life love: “Who is patient enough to wait / until evening, for an old woman whose body takes / all day to warm, the way the sun warms the stones.”
“There is a deep simple honesty about her work,” wrote another admirer, author Robert Coover, “which is nevertheless complex, profound, and highly musical.”
Ms. Sklarew put out more than a dozen poetry collections and chapbooks, in addition to prose volumes that ranged from a collection of short fiction, “Like a Field Riddled by Ants” (1987), to “A Survivor Named Trauma” (2020), a nonfiction study of memory and the Holocaust.
Ms. Sklarew in 2020 at her home in Bethesda, Maryland. (Renee Sklarew)
She also helped shape and nurture the Washington poetry scene as a professor at American University, where she co-founded the MFA program in creative writing and taught some 10,000 students.
Ms. Sklarew joined the faculty in 1970 — her earliest pupils included veterans returning from Vietnam — and continued to teach until her retirement in 2007, aside from a four-year hiatus in which she served as president of Yaddo, the renowned artists colony in Upstate New York.
Friends said that Ms. Sklarew, while soft-spoken, was a powerful advocate for young writers and fellow poets. She helped chronicle and promote Washington’s literary history through an archival project, A Splendid Wake, and served on the advisory board of Furious Flower, a Black poetry center at James Madison University.
Washington poet E. Ethelbert Miller recalled that in the 1980s, at a time when the city’s racial divide was especially stark, Ms. Sklarew was unusual among White poets and teachers in championing the work of African Americans — Sterling A. Brown, Primus St. John, Lance Jeffers, among others — and inviting Black poets to teach at AU.
“If I had to compare Myra to somebody,” Miller said in a phone interview, “I’d compare her to Lucille Clifton,” the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award winner. “They were very humble, very spiritual, and what happens is you realize in their presence that if you want to be a writer, this is what it is to be a writer. It’s not just books and stuff. You have to be a walking poem.”
Although Ms. Sklarew was always writing, according to her family, she initially trained in biology, not poetry. She studied bacterial viruses and genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, according to an AU biography, and in the mid-1950s she was a research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine, working with monkeys as part of research studies involving memory and the workings of the frontal lobe.
Ms. Sklarew would later tell her writing students that she knew more about neurophysiology than literary history. She remained fascinated by science long after she left the laboratory to start a family, attending lectures at the National Institutes of Health and incorporating biological references into poems such as “The Origin of Species,” a cheeky ode to Darwin and the varieties of animal life, from the flightless beetles of Madeira to the lowly intestinal worm that “stays confined to his peculiar station.”
From the start of her career as a published poet, she also explored themes of Jewish faith and identity. A granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, she won a National Jewish Book Award for her first major collection, “From the Backyard of the Diaspora” (1976), and later wrote at length about the Holocaust, conducting interviews with survivors, rescuers, collaborators and other eyewitnesses in Lithuania, where dozens of her relatives had been murdered.
Ms. Sklarew made her first visit to the country in 1993, following its independence from the Soviet Union. “I went with no knowledge,” she recalled in a 2011 interview with VilNews, a Lithuanian news site. “I didn’t know a soul and didn’t know the language. I just started walking.”
The trip laid the groundwork for her free-verse poem “Lithuania,” the centerpiece of her 2000 book “The Witness Trees.” Drawn from interviews, letters and archival documents, the poem recounted the 1941 destruction of her mother’s ancestral village, Keidan, also known as Kedainiai, where about 2,000 Jewish men, women and children were incarcerated in a ghetto, pushed into crowded stables, held for 13 days without food and then driven to the banks of the Smilga River. According to an account from Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, the group was forced to undress and confined to deep pits, where they were murdered by Nazi soldiers wielding machine guns, aided by Lithuanian collaborators.
Ms. Sklarew visited the site of the massacre and spoke there at a commemorative event in 2011, when plaques were installed to honor the victims.
“I tell you,” she wrote in “Lithuania,” “once we have found our dead, though we cannot hear their / answering voices among the sounds of this world, we will tear / open the skin of the earth / to admit them. We will not lose them again.”
The second of three sisters, Myra Freena Weisberg was born in Baltimore on Dec. 18, 1934. Her father, Samuel Weisberg, was a biochemist who worked on homogenized milk, helped develop synthetic rubber during World War II and became a research and development director with Kraft. Her mother, the former Anne Wolpe, was a children’s librarian who once served as an assistant curator at the Smithsonian, specializing in starfish, sea urchins and other marine animals.
Ms. Sklarew was a teenager when she and her family moved to East Islip, New York, where she graduated from high school and played the piano in a dance band. She studied biology at Tufts University and in 1955 married Bruce Sklarew, a fellow student. After receiving her bachelor’s degree the next year, she followed her husband to Yale, where he was training to become a doctor. They settled in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1961.
While her husband practiced in Washington as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Ms. Sklarew looked after their two children, taught at an outdoor nursery school and became the president of a local nursery cooperative. She went back to school to refine her technique as a poet, studying at Johns Hopkins University under Elliott Coleman, an earlier mentor to writers Russell Baker and John Barth. She received a master’s degree in 1970.
Ms. Sklarew was president of Yaddo, which hosts artists and writers on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, from 1987 to 1991. She credited an earlier stay at the community with helping her make a crucial leap as a poet, during a period when she was learning to work independently after her children were grown and her marriage had ended in divorce.
Previously, she told the Boston Globe, “I’d never had permission just to do my own work. … I had to do my writing around the edges. It took me two weeks at Yaddo to get to something deep. It was the last turning point in my life as a writer.”
In addition to her daughter, Deborah, survivors include a son, Eric; a sister; three granddaughters; and two great-granddaughters.
Ms. Sklarew prepared for her death by writing her own obituary in 2015, referring to herself in the third person. The obit, which ran in The Washington Post with additions from her family, playfully imagined that she had “been done in by the overflow of books in her house,” and reported that it was hard to tell whether she had been flattened by copies of Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Mendele Mocher Sforim’s short stories or Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry.”
“They were silent as stone when the investigators arrived to find out what had happened,” Ms. Sklarew wrote of her books. “Faithful as the trees guarding her house and only if a small wind came up, would a page flutter here and there, revealing nothing. Thus do we bid farewell to the one who said most hesitantly: ‘I am a poet.’ Or was it, ‘Am I a poet?’”