Goedicke, Patricia 1931-2006

(Patricia McKenna Goedicke, Patricia Robinson)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 21, 1931, in Boston, MA; died of pneumonia as a complication of cancer, July 14, 2006, in Missoula, MT. Educator and author. A professor emerita at the University of Montana, Goedicke was a Pushcart Prize-winning poet. Completing her undergraduate studies at Middlebury College in 1953, she worked as an editorial assistant in New York City for three years and studied under W.H. Auden at the Young Men's Hebrew Association in 1955. She left work and school for a time after marrying her first husband, whom she would divorce in 1968. By then she had already gone back to work, first as an editor for the poetry broadsheet Page from 1961 to 1966, then as an English instructor at Ohio University from 1963 to 1968. At the university, she earned a master's degree in creative writing and poetry in 1965, and three years later she released her first verse collection, Between Oceans (1968). A residency at the MacDowell Colony introduced her to her second husband, the author Leonard Wallace Robinson. She left Ohio to be a lecturer in English at Hunter College in New York City for two years, then was associate professor of creative writing at the Instituto Allende in Mexico from 1972 to 1979. During this period, she released For the Four Corners (1976) and The Trail That Turns on Itself (1978), while also winning the Pushcart Prize in 1977. Next, Goedicke was a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College for a year before finally settling down at the University of Montana, where she taught from 1981 until her 2003 retirement. After becoming a professor emerita, however, she continued to teach poetry workshops. As a poet, Goedicke was widely praised for her strong and emotional verses, which often dealt with such issues as illness, death, and recovery. She published about a dozen collections in all, including The Wind of Our Going (1985), The Tongues We Speak: New and Selected Poems (1989), Invisible Horses (1996), and As Earth Begins to End: New Poems (2000), and her verses appeared in numerous anthologies. Among her other honors, she received the William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry in 1977, the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner in 1987, and several Edward Stanley Awards, most recently being named a Distinguished Alumna of Ohio University in 2002.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2006, p. B12. Washington Post, July 30, 2006, p. C10.