Lucie Brock-Broido born "Lucy Brock" (May 22, 1956 – March 6, 2018) was an American poet, widely acclaimed as one of the most distinctive and influential voices of her generation. Noteworthy for her work as a teacher, Brock-Broido served as a visiting professor of creative writing at Princeton University, the Briggs-Copeland Poet in Residence and director of creative writing at Harvard University, and as professor of creative writing and director of poetry at Columbia University. Throughout her career, she mentored multiple generations of new American poets, including Tracy K. Smith, Timothy Donnelly, Kevin Young, Mary Jo Bang, Stephanie Burt, and Max Ritvo.
Brock-Broido's final collection Stay, Illusion, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2013 to widespread critical acclaim, and was a finalist for the
National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award. Notices of her death in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker, praised her “brilliant nervosity,” “beautifully embroidered, fanciful language,” and the “formal rigor and a supernatural sensibility that placed her in the lineage of revelatory American poetic voices like Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath.”
Brock-Broido was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 22, 1956. Her father David Broido was a real estate developer, and her mother Virginia “Ginger” Brock Greenwald was a theatre artist. Throughout her career, Greenwald was a prolific playwright, appeared on screen in the films of George A. Romero, served on the board of directors for the Pittsburgh Playhouse, and regularly directed plays at the City Theatre.
Throughout childhood, Brock-Broido shared her mother's love for theatre, performing in local productions of plays by Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht, and August Strindberg. Despite initial plans to become and actress and playwright, Brock-broido would later recall in an interview with Guernica,
I stopped my love affair with theater because I had irrevocable stage fright, which I still have. What I do with my life now is manage my stage fright, because when you're the teacher, you have to be Miss Julie or Solange in The Maids. You have to live inside The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Or become Miss Jean Brodie “in the prime of her life”. Or become Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park.
She eventually embraced poetry as an adolescent, once recalling,
I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world. I was thirteen and in Algebra class. That was the day I decided I would be a poet for all time. I walked out of class and dropped out of school. That doesn't mean I became a poet, but I did have this absolute severance with one period of my life where I felt I was being made to live in the world I was brought into—Straight-A student, The Most Perfect Little Girl—that I couldn't inhabit anymore. And so I went to a place I felt I could inhabit which turned out to be, as we know about poetry, more hellish than the one I left!
It was at this time that she changed her given name of "Lucy Brock" to "Lucie Brock-Broido," as the later was "more becoming of a poet." She attended the Wightman School before matriculating in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she studied under the poet Richard Howard and completed consecutive Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in creative writing. In a 1995 interview with BOMB Magazine she would recall,
I remember a time in 1979 when Richard Howard, who was my teacher at Johns Hopkins, asked us all to submit a poem in order to be admitted to his graduate workshop. I gave him an eighty-something page poem called “Pornography,” and he handed it back to me a week later, put his monocle on, and said, “My dear, there's not a line break in the whole 80 pages.” At which point I thought I would writhe on the train station platform where we stood. I thought, “What do you mean there's not a line break? Look at the lines, there are thousands of them!” But I had no concept of what a line break—no less a line—was. You spend a lifetime making up your line. Or—in every book, you reinvent the thing itself.
Brock-Broido went on to complete an MFA in poetry at Columbia University, where she studied under the poet Stanley Kunitz, who she would call “my prophet-teacher.” Kunitz would later praise his former student noting, “Brock-Broido’s brilliant nervosity and taste for the fantastic impel her to explore the obscure corners of the psyche and the fringes of ordinary human experience. Her poems are original, strange, often unsettling, and mostly beautiful.”
After graduating from Columbia in 1982, Brock Broido was awarded a yearlong fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. During her fellowship year, Brock-Broido lived in residency alongside fellow writers Cyrus Cassells, Alice Fulton, Cynthia Huntington, Neil McMahon, and Kate Wheeler, as she developed what would eventually become her first collection, A Hunger. She further developed the collection the following year as a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia.
In the mid 1980s Brock-Broido moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which at the time was “the epicenter of American poetry.” During this period she befriended fellow poet Marie Howe, a relationship that would deeply impact the work of both women. In 1985 Brock-Broido received a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Then in 1987 she received both a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and Narrative Poetry Award from the New England Review.
In 1988, Alfred A. Knopf published Brock-Broido's debut poetry collection, A Hunger, to widespread critical acclaim. The collection explores complex themes of desire, mortality, and existential longing. Brock-Broido's work is often characterized by its dense, lyrical style, rich imagery, and emotional intensity. Her language can be intricate and somewhat opaque, blending a sense of beauty with elements of darkness. In this collection, her poems examine the body, hunger (both literal and metaphorical), and the intense desire for connection and understanding. Brock-Broido's style is known for its unique and somewhat baroque syntax, which draws from the influences of confessional poetry and symbolist aesthetics. A Hunger set the tone for her subsequent works, establishing her voice as one of mystery and intensity in contemporary American poetry. In a review for The New Yorker, Helen Vendler wrote:
Brock-Broido’s talismanic words open into a magical territory of 'Domestic Mysticism'... A violently skewed portrait of the female poet and her Muse, a hyped-up version of Stevens and his interior paramour, locked in a soliloquy 'in which being there together is enough'... Something in Brock-Broido likes stealth, toxicity, wildness, neon—'perfect mean lines'... The poems lead off the page.
Cynthia Macdonald offered similar praise noting, “These poems are out of Stevens in the abundance, glitter, and seductiveness of their language, out of Browning in the authority of their inhabiting, and out of Plath in the ferocity and passion of their holding on—to feeling, to life, and to us... An astonishing first book.” The collection explores complex themes of desire, mortality, and existential longing. Brock-Broido's work is often characterized by its dense, lyrical style, rich imagery, and emotional intensity. Her language can be intricate and somewhat opaque, blending a sense of beauty with elements of darkness. In this collection, her poems examine the body, hunger (both literal and metaphorical), and the intense desire for connection and understanding. Brock-Broido's style is known for its unique and somewhat baroque syntax, which draws from the influences of confessional poetry and symbolist aesthetics. A Hunger set the tone for her subsequent works, establishing her voice as one of mystery and intensity in contemporary American poetry. The collection was subsequently reprinted three times in the following six years.