Mona Van Duyn May 9, 1921 – December 2, 2004

Poet Mona Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa (1921). Her mother was an extremely strict and protective woman and Van Duyn often felt as though she were growing up in a prison. She had to go to bed every night at 7:30 and her mother kept her home from school for weeks on end if she showed the slightest sign of a cold. She said, "[Any] attempts at disobedience were quickly squashed by frightening threats that I would get sick and die, since my parents would refuse to pay the doctor bills."

Since she was rarely allowed to leave the house, she started reading all the time, even though her mother warned her that so much reading could cause her to lose her mind. At school, the other kids made fun of her because she was such a good student and because she was so tall. She was the tallest woman in her town and she sometimes wondered if she might be the tallest woman in the world. The only place she felt free was in her notebook, which she began filling with poetry.

After high school, she thought she wanted to be a writer or a dress designer, and only chose writing because a professor in college encouraged her. She got a degree in English and became a college professor, and finally published her first book of poetry, Valentines to the Wide World, in 1959. She was thirty-eight years old. She later said, "For half my life, nobody knew I wrote."

She published many books of poetry, including Near Changes (1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her Selected Poems came out in 2002.



Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri
The quake last night was nothing personal,
you told me this morning. I think one always wonders,
unless, of course, something is visible: tremors
that take us, private and willy-nilly, are usual.

But the earth said last night that what I feel,
you feel; what secretly moves you, moves me.
One small, sensuous catastrophe
makes inklings letters, spelled in a worldly tremble.

The earth, with others on it, turns in its course
as we turn toward each other, less than ourselves, gross,
mindless, more than we were. Pebbles, we swell
to planets, nearing the universal roll,
in our conceit even comprehending the sun,
whose bright ordeal leaves cool men woebegone.