Poets’ Tribute to Patricia Fargnoli: Preface
POETS’ TRIBUTE TO PATRICIA FARGNOLI
Contributors: Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Ana Doina, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Ann Hostetler, Louisa Howerow, Athena Kildegaard, Alicia Ostriker, Penelope Scambly Schott, Barbara A. Taylor
Preface
Poems presented in the following pages are for Patricia Fargnoli, who died on February 18, 2021. She was one of the original members of our online poetry workshop, which began in 2005 as a spinoff from the larger group WOM-PO. Some of us knew each other in the flesh, but mostly our contact was virtual. Sharing poems over the years, critiquing each other’s work, commiserating, rejoicing, we all grew very close—in fact, we grew to love each other. So we grieved as Pat went through her final, extended illness, and we grieve her still. Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 2006 to 2009, author of five prize-winning books of poems, she was an astonishingly beautiful poet, whose poems speak with gravitas, courage, and tenderness, even through grief and physical suffering, of the soul’s desire to bless. —Ann Fisher-Wirth