Barry Goldensohn
Barry Goldensohn, a gifted poet and beloved professor of English emeritus whose teaching and writing inspired countless colleagues and students, died on Sunday, March 26, 2023. He was 85.
Barry joined Skidmore in 1982 following appointments at Goddard College and Hampshire College. He served as director of creative writing at Skidmore until his retirement in 2003.
Barry’s books of poetry include “The Hundred Yard Dash Man,” “Saint Venus Eve,” “Uncarving the Block,” “The Marrano,” and, most recently, “Snake in the Spine, Wolf in the Heart.” His poetry has been published widely and appeared in The New York Review of Books, Salmagundi, and many other publications.
Professor of English and Salmagundi Editor Robert Boyers, a close friend, described how Barry often strolled about the English Department, stopping in and brightening colleagues’ day with a story or a recommendation for a book he had read or a film he had seen.
“He was warm, casual, companionable, and curious. Enormously learned and eager to share, he often entertained students and colleagues with memorized poems and thoroughly digested bits of literary, political, and historical information,” Bob said. “I have never met a colleague more generous.”
A popular instructor, Barry often hosted his poetry classes at his home, and the meetings would sometimes last until late at night. He always challenged his students to improve their writing, once describing his teaching style as “friendly, but severe!”
“His poetry students adored him as much as his colleagues did,” Bob Boyers continued. “An unusual number of these students went on to top graduate schools and always cited Barry as the primary reason for their desire to go forward with their poetry studies.”
Born on April 26, 1937, in New York City, Barry attended Oberlin College and completed graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin.
At Oberlin, Barry met his future wife of more than six decades, Lorrie, who survives him along with their children, Matthew and Rachel, and several grandchildren.
In a 2019 interview with Sightlines magazine, Barry spoke of his fight with cancer and his wide-ranging body of work; he quipped that several of his most recently published poems dealt with death. In one of them, “Dissonance,” dedicated to the late poet J.D. McClatchy and published in The Yale Review in 2019, he described how the sound of friends’ voices gradually offered solace in a time of loss:
and from a bright, broad hallway a whisper,
another death, spreads and hushes the room.
Slowly talk resumes, basso, alto,
that swells with urgent voices, my children, my friends,
a dissonant chorus that recomposes the heart.
Barry’s friends and colleagues now add their own voices to that chorus.
The fall 2023 issue of Salmagundi will contain a memorial tribute and reprint several of his poems.