I first met Max Ritvo on the page, in the winter of 2013. I was in my office at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and his M.F.A. application was in its green folder, among the hundreds of other green folders, anonymous in their likeness—from the outside. Admissions is a daunting process each year—joyful, dreadful, exhilarating, overwhelming. My colleagues and I tend to stay up all night on the first cut; delirium sets in after the first twelve hours. We are in the business of hunting for truffles, ever on the alert for something that stands out—a sudden manuscript of poems that entreats, intrigues, or one that just gives off heat, or even electricity.
When I came across Max’s application, it was absolutely beckoning: his literary essay plainly brilliant, his personal essay kind of kooky. Midpage, he called out my name: “Lucie, if you’re reading this, check out my poem ‘Troy.’ ” He just sauntered up to the edge of the proscenium, and broke its convention. The poems leapt off the page: ungoverned, astronomical, astrological, indigenous (but from where?), witty, ensorcelling, and brave.
After the long process is through, we phone each of our accepted poets. Max’s was the first call I made that year, and I said to him, in a word: C’mere. We were on the phone for nearly an hour. I was smitten on all counts.
On the first day of school that following autumn, I met Max in real life. We found each other right away. Hearts singing. As we sat together in the late-afternoon sun on the steps of Low Library, another first-year poet came to join us. She was smoking and asked Max if he wanted a cig. He said, poker-faced, “Oh, no thank you. I have cancer.”
He did have cancer, a rare and often deadly form called Ewing’s sarcoma. He was diagnosed at the age of fifteen. Once you are in its vortex, then in remission, then pulled back in again, it seems most unlikely that you will ever be let go.
As a student, Max was generous, often brilliant. Almost everything he did was magic—peculiar, off guard, tender, even tenderer. From time to time, a rogue joy would overtake him and he would bust into song during class—his voice was rich, handsome, trained, and this singing was seductive, and ridiculously, hilariously distracting. I told him that he’d have to go in the corner facing away from us if he did it again. He did it again.
Imagine, in a grainy nineteen-thirties film, on a jumpy speed, a huge bank of Bell Telephone operators (they were called “girls”), seated like symmetrical Rockettes in front of a forty-foot metal switchboard, with hundreds and hundreds of variegated color wires and plugs, a thousand color-coded jacks to place them in, a technical marvel of the twentieth century. Imagine, then, being the supervisor there, the taller woman on roller skates, gliding thither and yon from one station to the next, up and down the avenue of the machine and its girls, making certain each connection winds up in its proper place. That whoever it is who wants to speak to whomever can, astonishingly, be patched through to that other, getting it right.
This is what it felt like to be Max’s teacher. I was the supervisor on her roller skates. I believe his imagination must have been born fully formed, before he had a language for his gifts. I think he was an infant scholar, a child genius, a Brother from Another Planet. For him, all of the synapses and fantasies, the humanity and spirit, were there just for the plucking. For me, as his mentor, all I needed to learn in order to teach him was to stay one roller glide ahead of him, to oversee the geometries and the effulgences of his imagination, to help beckon and tease each right wire into each right plug.
The work he turned in for class was often untethered, a beautiful little wreck on its way to being numinous. He may well have been one of the most willful young poets I’ve ever worked with; though ever courtly and irreverent and beguilingly comical in his manner, he was, in a sense, adamantine in his surrendering to change. But I never once caught him being innocent. He was in a hurry; he was dying, though he always carried with him the audacity of real hope.
In a poem, he had written, “Adore me to sleep before sleep can adore me on its own terms.”
There was always, for me, a finitude in every hour I spent with him. He did not carry that. He stood in front of it, stood beside it. I was the one who carried his constant impending death along with me. I have never mastered the art of embracing impermanence. Max had that down. It was as if he had eighty years of living already in him, at the age of twenty-two.
Our last pedagogical adventure took place in February of 2016. At the end of the M.F.A. program, each student submits a thesis, a book-length manuscript of poems that will eventually become his or her first book. Two professors read each thesis, each professor writes a response, then we meet together with the student for a one-hour conference.
I was one of Max’s readers, along with my colleague Dottie Lasky. He had left the city by then (his illness was advancing), and he was at home with his family, in Los Angeles. So our meeting with him was by Skype. It went on for two days, about six hours the first evening, and another four or five the following day. It was—excessive. It was divine. It was hysterically funny. When the discussion became very serious, sometimes Max would turn away from the camera and come back with a Post-It note stuck to his forehead, each expressing what he really thought, each to make us crack up, entirely. One note said: Annoyed_._ Another: Ecstatic. Another: Are you serious?
His company those nights was irresistible, riddled with gratitude plus punk. From time to time he became defensive. Dottie passed me a note that said: He gets angry when he’s learning. The manuscript was beautifully flawed, full of conjuring, a menagerie of tones, a clarity of devastation, the unspeakable spoken and made humane, the dreadful made beautiful, the erotic made quirky, the febrile details—the ebullient. We wanted to give him the whole world while his world was still almost whole.
In the last poem in his book, “Universe Where We Weren’t Artists,” Max wrote,
The last time I saw Max was in June of 2016. (His poem “Poem to My Litter” was published in The New Yorker that same month.) I flew down from Cambridge to New York for the day. He was back in treatment at Sloan Kettering, and was told that he might die that night. He did not. So many near-deaths, but he went on not dying. Back in L.A. for the summer, still trying avant-garde experimental treatments, he began to fail. I wrote a letter about the afterlife to him. Neither of us believed in an afterlife. His poems would be his life after this one. By then, his first book, “Four Reincarnations,” was well on the way to publication. I wrote to him, sentimental, ravishing, about all of his work. He texted back, Save it for the blurb!
In July, we spoke on the phone, often, though his voice was failing, going underwater it seemed. Then one day he texted me, My voice is getting warbly and hoarse. I can’t really sing which drives me nuts.
He is thinking of singing, even now?
So began a texting frenzy. I was, surreptitiously, working on that blurb for his first book, his last book. I decided a slight inquisition was in order. If you were a fish, I asked him, what kind would you be? He texted, Let me think on that. The next day he wrote back, I would be an opaline gourami. I had to look that up. It’s an exotic freshwater species, omnivorous and silvery-blue, which breathes directly from the water’s surface, from the air! Perfect. More questions: Who is your favorite actor? He wrote, I don’t like actors. Dancer? Kazvo Ohno. Philosopher? Hume, Wittgenstein, Empedocles. Musician? Nina Simone, Tom Waits, Radiohead, Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Otis Redding, Lhasa de Sela, Nina Simone. Visual? Van Gogh, Schiele, Hokusai. He closed: Kafka is the best Artist. I love you.
Several days before Max died, on August 23, 2016, he left me a gift. A voice message, breathless, whispered, almost under the water by now. But there was no fear in his voice.
If you could confect a message—let’s say just one, in this lifetime, if you could imagine someone saying everything you ever wanted to hear, from a confidant, a soul mate, a student, a teacher, this was that thing. It was the only communication we’d ever had that was devoid of irony. Just straight. Just forward. It was impossible to think of it as closure, because that is something I could never have with Max.
Sometimes it feels strange to have had him here, just as it now feels impossibly strange to not have him here. Almost every time I spoke—I speak—of him, I am compelled to use the word “luminous.”
Ours was, as Wallace Stevens wrote in his “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” the intensest rendezvous. Plain and simple: I adored this kid, this student of mine. I adore him still.
