Call And Response

The legacy of Max Ritvo

- Dan Chiasson

Around 2012, I began to hear from friends about a remarkable young poet, still an undergraduate at Yale. I never met Max Ritvo, but in the years that followed I felt that I came to know him: his friendly curiosity, his wit and preternatural lyric gifts, and, terribly, his illness. Given a diagnosis of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, when he was sixteen, Ritvo died in 2016, at the age of twenty-five. His emergence as a writer was, in fact, a record of his imminent disappearance. He was making himself unforgettable, one vivid trace at a time.

In 2013, Ritvo began an M.F.A. program at Columbia University. Clips of his readings turned up on YouTube, and spread: friends described to me with animated precision poems that I had not yet seen. As they were published—in magazines, in a chapbook, “Aeons,” and finally, posthumously, in his début volume, “Four Reincarnations”—they almost seemed late to the party. And yet they still came as a shock. Writing in Poetry, Helen Vendler compared their effects to strobe lighting: Ritvo’s talent illuminated his material starkly and brightly, “flash after flash.”