Hayden Carruth, 87; poet wrote of life's 'miserloos'

Hayden Carruth at his home in Munnsville, N.Y., in 1997. (Al campanie/post standard)

Awakening one night, the poet Hayden Carruth found a spider sharing his pillow. "I blew at it gently," he later wrote, "and I swear it turned around and looked at me."

Such attention to minutiae and to the sprawl of human emotion informed his poetry and prose, which filled more than 30 books. He drew material from his childhood in Connecticut, a stay in a psychiatric institution outside New York City, a hardscrabble life he eked out for 20 years in Vermont, and his final decades outside Syracuse, N.Y, where he taught at the university and at last reaped literary accolades.

"Hayden was a great gloomster, yet one always came away from him and from his poetry invigorated, with a fuller forgiveness for life's miserloos, and a deeper particular understanding of this world's pleasures," his wife, the poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin Carruth, wrote while he was hospitalized after a series of strokes. She borrowed her husband's word "miserloos," which he coined to merge life's miseries and losses. "He made sorrow dazzle. Just like the jazzers and blues singers he so loved, he made sorrow dance and woe sing."

Mr. Carruth died at home in Munnsville, N.Y., Monday of complications from the strokes. Friends sat around his bed, reading his poetry and drinking whiskey, and his cat lay curled at his feet. He was 87.

"He feared death all his life, and he had the easiest death possible," his wife said. "I was holding him in my arms, and I felt his last breaths. They just died away like falling wind, and he was gone."

Earlier this year, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave Mr. Carruth its Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, which it presents to poets whose careers may have escaped due recognition. His work had not gone unnoticed, however. Mr. Carruth received a National Book Award for "Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey," a poetry collection published in 1996. "Collected Shorter Poems," published in 1992, received a National Book Critics' Circle award. His work also was a finalist for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

From rhyme to free verse, from essays to criticism, letters, and blurbs, Mr. Carruth seemed to write effortlessly across the literary landscape. Often less at ease in the physical world, he at one point suffered mightily from agoraphobia and could barely walk a block from home.

"Agoraphobia," he once wrote, "is when you breathe and eat the dust of oblivion."

A mental breakdown led to electroshock treatment in the early 1950s. Mr. Carruth lived for a while afterward in Norwalk, Conn., and then retreated to a rural house in Johnson, Vt., a short drive from the Canadian border, where for two decades he supported himself and his family with piecemeal work as a writer and editor, and by manual labor on neighbors' farms. The state, along with its serenity, language, and rural vigor, found its way into Mr. Carruth's writing. In turn, his work became a touchstone for other Vermont writers.

"Nobody has ever written about the state with the truth and insight and realistic understanding and sensitivity to its values as Hayden Carruth has," Galway Kinnell, a former Vermont poet laureate, told the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press in 2002. "And so that's one reason why he's a hero to so many poets."

Mr. Carruth told the newspaper for the same article that "when I go back to Vermont, which I haven't done very much lately because I've been ill, I feel as if that's where I belong."

In 1979, Mr. Carruth left Vermont to teach at Syracuse University and eventually settled in Munnsville, in a house on a rural hillside.

"After his really catastrophic illness in the '50s, he developed an extraordinary depth of empathy, and he used that empathy to write out of his own profound suffering as a way of understanding the human condition," said Brooks Haxton, an English professor in the creative writing program at Syracuse. "He always felt very deeply that a poem was not simply an act of personal expression, but what he called in one of his essays an act of love. He wrote that the poet uses a poem as a way of moving beyond any merely personal concerns into a kind of language where poet and reader meet in the profoundest imaginative empathy for one another."

Mr. Carruth grew up in Woodbury, Conn., where his father was a journalist and his grandfather had been a writer and editor. Writing was "the family racket," he told the University of Chicago's alumni magazine three years ago.

In 1943, Mr. Carruth graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote for the student newspaper and other publications.

He served in the Army Air Corps, and then received a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1948. For a time he was editor of Poetry magazine, before suffering the breakdown that led to treatment in a psychiatric hospital.

His first book of poetry, "The Crow and the Heart," was published in 1959.

Mr. Carruth, who also struggled with alcoholism, was married and divorced three times before marrying Joe-Anne McLaughlin in 1989.

"My dear, we are in love. It's a fact, certifiable," he wrote of his wife in "Resorts," a poem collected in "Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey."

And yet, even when he was at his happiest, dark thoughts were never far, though at times he kept them at bay. Elsewhere in the collection he wrote:

"Why don't you write a poem that will prepare me for your death?" you said.

It was a rare day here in our climate, bright and sunny. I didn't feel like dying that day.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Carruth leaves a son, David of Canastota, N.Y.; three grandsons; a granddaughter; and two great-granddaughters.

A service will be announced.