Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky
Born	(1918-05-23)May 23, 1918 New York City, U.S.
Died	January 7, 2023(2023-01-07) (aged 104) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Poet
Alma mater	University of California, Los Angeles
Partner	Eva Kollisch ​ (m. 2009)​

Naomi Replansky (May 23, 1918 – January 7, 2023) was an American poet.

Background

Replansky was born in the Bronx, graduating from James Monroe High School. She enrolled at Hunter College but did not graduate, instead dropping out to look for work. In the 1950s, she attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a bachelor's degree in geography.

Work

Replansky was an instructor of poetry at Pitzer College, and also taught the subject at the Henry Street Settlement. Her Collected Poems won the Poetry Society of America's 2013 William Carlos Williams Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Poets' Prize. Replansky's poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, such as No More Masks!, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, and Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era. Her four books of poetry are:

• Ring Song (Scribners 1952)
• Twenty-One Poems, Old and New (Gingko Press 1988)
• The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press 1994)
• Collected Poems (Black Sparrow Press/Godine 2012)

"My chief poetic influences," Replansky stated, "have been William Blake, folk songs, Shakespeare, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson and Japanese poetry."

Ring Song, containing poems written from 1936 to 1952, was a finalist for the 1953 National Book Award. Of the following hiatus in publication, she says, “I write slowly.” The chapbook Twenty-One Poems contains versions of work contained in the other two collections. The Dangerous World contains forty-two new poems as well as twenty-five revised poems from Ring Song. The meticulousness of her work indicates a painstaking mind and an unusual degree of perfectionism in the craftsmanship of her poems. Though often small in scale, they are giant in meaning. Her Collected Poems include many unpublished works.

The clarity and power of Replansky's work have been praised by such writers as David Ignatow, Marie Ponsot, Grace Paley, and Ursula K. Le Guin. George Oppen wrote of her in 1981: “Naomi Replansky must be counted among the most brilliant American poets. That she has not received adequate praise is one of the major mysteries of the world of poetry.” Booklist said of The Dangerous World, “with timeless grace, she sets each poem simmering with powerful phrasing and universal experience.... Replansky brings us ageless work in a collection that should not be missed.”

Replansky's work was the subject of a lengthy article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which cites United States Poet Laureate Philip Levine, "who once characterized Replansky as 'an intensely political poet, appalled by the cruelty, greed, and corruption of the masters of nations and corporations, appalled and enraged.' Nevertheless, she mostly eschews the role of protest poet, opting instead to dramatize the intense vulnerability of individual human subjects in a verse style that is both delicate and tough-minded.... One lives with Replansky’s poems instead of simply reading or hearing them, because they speak, with intensity and concision, to essential human concerns: the longing to belong and the concomitant ache of exclusion; rage against injustice; awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities, particularly those that come with aging; and the profound joy at experiencing true fellowship with others or communion with oneself." "

She was also known for her translations from Yiddish and from the German of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt Brecht; Brecht's "Der Sumpf," set by composer Hanns Eisler as one of five "Hollywood Elegies," was long known only in her version ("The Swamp") until the original resurfaced among Peter Lorre's papers and was published in the 1997 Frankfurt edition. Her translation of Brecht's play, "St. Joan of the Stockyards" was performed off-Broadway by the Encounter Theater Company.

A documentary film Naomi Replansky at 100 by Megan Rossman, won several honors. An oil on linen portrait of Replansky by the artist Joseph Solman is in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Personal life

Replansky turned 100 in May 2018 and lived another four years, giving her last public reading on December 10, 2022, less than a month before her death. After spending much of her adult life in Los Angeles and San Francisco, she later lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner, Eva Kollisch (born 1925), a writer and long-time professor of comparative literature and women's studies at Sarah Lawrence College. Replansky and Kollisch married in 2009.

Replansky died on January 7, 2023, at the age of 104.

Further reading

• ″Auguries of Experience: The Poetry of Naomi Replansky,″ review article by Eric Gudas. Los Angeles Review of Books, September 8, 2016.
• "Justice, Poverty and Gender: Social Themes in the Poetry of Naomi Replansky," thesis by Ashley Ray, CUNY 1996.
• Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era, edited by Estelle Gershgoren Novak. University of New Mexico Press 2002.
• "A Talk with Naomi Replansky" Edith Chevat and Naomi Replansky, Bridges, Vol. 9, No. 2, (Fall, 2002), pp. 99–103.
• “‘These Were Our Times’: Red-Baiting, Blacklisting, and the Lost Literature of Dissent in Mid-Twentieth-Century California," doctoral thesis by Jessica Breheny, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2004.

External links

• PennSound: Naomi Replansky Sound recordings on PennSound
• Naomi Replansky Official site includes sample works of Naomi Replansky
• A Reading from Naomi Replansky Naomi Replansky reading podcast
• The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media
• At-Home with Joan: Naomi Replansky
• "11 female voices, from age 13 to 110, on why the vote matters" New York Times, August 8, 2020.