I knew Jeff mainly from our work together during our senior year on Mother magazine. Peter Schjeldahl, now the celebrated art critic for The New Yorker, had started the little magazine of poetry, art and literature, then moved to Paris. Jeff had been his co-editor, but Peter did not want to leave the responsibilities of publication to Jeff alone. A somewhat taciturn but also amused and amusing character, Jeff seemed at first blush an unlikely candidate for editor of a poetry magazine: he was a lanky Texan with a passion for guns (even keeping a rifle in his dorm room and taking target shots on campus). But he had a keen critical eye as an editor and wrote poems pervaded with an eerie, ominous sensibility. After graduation we lost track of each other, and then only through the grapevine did I hear of his death, reportedly a suicide, though I have no confirmation of anything about his last days.
Here is one of Jeff’s poems from Mother No. 3.
‘Upon his cold and bloodless’
Upon his cold and bloodless
heartstone
things grew arms and legs
and crawled
in the abundant morning.
Clutching at their centers
they gasped at
the mist and waving cane.
Thus even in death
he fathered
though tentatively
a great race upon or swamp.
Comments
I knew Jeff mainly from our work together during our senior year on Mother magazine. Peter Schjeldahl, now the celebrated art critic for The New Yorker, had started the little magazine of poetry, art and literature, then moved to Paris. Jeff had been his co-editor, but Peter did not want to leave the responsibilities of publication to Jeff alone. A somewhat taciturn but also amused and amusing character, Jeff seemed at first blush an unlikely candidate for editor of a poetry magazine: he was a lanky Texan with a passion for guns (even keeping a rifle in his dorm room and taking target shots on campus). But he had a keen critical eye as an editor and wrote poems pervaded with an eerie, ominous sensibility. After graduation we lost track of each other, and then only through the grapevine did I hear of his death, reportedly a suicide, though I have no confirmation of anything about his last days.
Here is one of Jeff's poems from Mother No. 3.
'Upon his cold and bloodless'
Upon his cold and bloodless
heartstone
things grew arms and legs
and crawled
in the abundant morning.
Clutching at their centers
they gasped at
the mist and waving cane.
Thus even in death
he fathered
though tentatively
a great race upon or swamp.