Poet, Hayden Carruth, dead at age 87
Whether turning to the immense world of nature for answers, or just looking out his window (he was Agoraphobic), Hayden Carruth wrote of the sounds, the signs, and the silence that is all around us. He wrote the poem "Prepare," for his second wife, 30 years his junior, when she asked him to write a poem that would prepare her for his death.
Here, he reads from his poem "The Cows at Night," revealing that what scares and overwhelms him at times is the wide open spaces, the scores of cows, of women, of souls?
As he began to understand it more, he wrote of his mental illness. In the Sewanee Review (1999), he describes his state of mind: "Agoraphobia… is the scream lurking in your gorge, so ready to burst that the least noise above a cat's purr makes you tremble: when the marching band from the high school practices in the street outside you sit in the back of the closet, when the March wind lashes the treetops at night you crawl behind the sofa."
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