Max Ritvo

Max Ritvo
Born (1990-12-19)December 19, 1990
Los Angeles, California
Died August 23, 2016(2016-08-23) (aged 25)
Los Angeles, California
Occupation Poet
Nationality American
Alma mater Yale University;
Columbia University
Notable awards Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, 2014
Website
maxritvo.com

Max Ritvo (December 19, 1990 – August 23, 2016) was an American poet. Milkweed Editions posthumously published a full-length collection of his poems, Four Reincarnations, to positive critical reviews.

Biography

Max Ritvo was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 19, 1990, to Riva Ariella Ritvo, a child therapist and biomedical researcher, and Edward Ritvo, a psychiatrist and researcher.[1] He grew up with his two older sisters, Victoria and Skylre. The investor and philanthropist Alan B. Slifka was his stepfather.[1] A graduate of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles,[2] Ritvo earned his BA in English from Yale University, where he edited a literary magazine and performed with a sketch comedy troupe, and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. In 2014, he was awarded a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for his chapbook AEONS.[3] On August 1, 2015, he married Victoria Jackson-Hanen, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Princeton University, in a ceremony officiated by the poet Louise Glück. He was a poetry editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and a teaching fellow at Columbia.

Ritvo was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma at age 16 and died from the disease at his home in Los Angeles on August 23, 2016.

Max Ritvo, reading

Ritvo's work has appeared in Poetry,[4] The New Yorker,[5] Boston Review,[6] and as a Poem-a-day on Poets.org.[7] He gave numerous written and radio interviews before his death.[8][9][10][11]

Critical reception

Four Reincarnations, a full-length collection of Ritvo's poems, was published by Milkweed Editions in September 2016.

According to Lucie Brock-Broido of Boston Review, Ritvo is "a Realist, a gifted comic, an astronomer, a child genius, a Surrealist, a brainiac, and a purveyor of pure (and impure) joy. His work is composed, quite simply, of candor, of splendor, and of abandon."[6] Louise Glück wrote of his first published collection that it was "one of the most original and ambitious first books in my experience... marked by intellectual bravado and verbal extravagance."[1]

Stephen Burt of the Los Angeles Review of Books wrote, "...the poems are equally conscious of impending death and of the next day’s life, having spent time in a pool of self-skepticism and then emerged shining, shockingly clean..."[12] While noting that Ritvo "seems to have written most of this book with the clarity, the near equanimity, the distance from ordinary reversals and struggles, of much older poets who know that they are dying," Burt also writes, "But mortality is rarely his only subject: shyness, gratitude, and erotic attachment are as important as death itself."[12]

Literary critic Helen Vendler reviewed his work and likened him to Keats. She wrote:

Ritvo had the luck to study at Yale with Louise Glück and at Columbia with Lucie Brock-Broido, and to attract, before his death, many admirers of his ecstatic originality. Although he is inimitable, his example is there for young poets wanting to forsake simple transcriptive dailiness for the wilder country of the afflicted but dancing body and the devastated but joking mind.[13]

Legacy

In 2017, Milkweed Editions announced the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, an annual US$10,000 award and publication contract, supported by the Alan B. Slifka Foundation.[14]

Selected works

Collections

Selected poems

References

  1. 1 2 3 Schwartz, John (2016-08-26). "Max Ritvo, Poet Who Chronicled His Cancer Fight, Dies at 25". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  2. ↑ "Riva Ariella Ritvo, PhD - About Us". rivaariellaritvo.com. Retrieved 2017-06-18.
  3. ↑ "Chapbook Fellowships - Poetry Society of America". www.poetrysociety.org. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  4. ↑ "Max Ritvo". Poetry Foundation. 2017-06-17. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  5. ↑ "“Poem to My Litter”". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  6. 1 2 Brock-Broido, Lucie (2015-09-23). "Poet's Sampler: Max Ritvo". Boston Review. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  7. ↑ Ritvo, Max (June 15, 2015). "Touching the Floor". Touching the Floor. Retrieved June 17, 2017.
  8. ↑ Who Are You Calling 'Inspiring'?, retrieved 2017-06-17
  9. ↑ The Prank Your Body Plays On Life, retrieved 2017-06-17
  10. ↑ "#184: Max Ritvo | Dr. Drew Official Website - DrDrew.com". Dr. Drew | Official Website. 2015-07-19. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  11. ↑ "#238: Max Ritvo | Dr. Drew Official Website - DrDrew.com". Dr. Drew | Official Website. 2016-08-14. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  12. 1 2 Burt, Stephen (September 5, 2016). "The Wishes That We Harbor: The Poems of Max Ritvo and Heather Hartley". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
  13. ↑ "Words That Sing, Dance, Kiss by Helen Vendler". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Magazine. 2017-07-27. Retrieved 2017-07-27.
  14. ↑ "Max Ritvo Poetry Prize". Milkweed Editions. 2017-06-06. Retrieved 2017-06-17.
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