Her immediate survivors include her sister, Jean-Marie Cook, of Beirut, Lebanon; and her stepson, Rick Robinson of Knoxville, Tenn.
Patricia Goedicke, the name she used in her work, was the author of 12 books of poetry, the most recent of which, "As Earth Begins to End," was recognized by the American Library Association as one of the top 10 poetry books of the year 2000. She taught in the creative-writing program at the University of Montana for 25 years.
She was born Patricia Ann McKenna on June 21, 1931, in Boston and grew up in Hanover, N.H., where her father taught neurology and was the first resident psychiatrist at Dartmouth College. She and her sister, Jean-Marie, a longtime literature professor at American University in Beirut, were accomplished downhill skiers in high school, and Patricia competed on racing circuits. She earned a B.A. degree from Middlebury College in 1953, and an M.A. degree in creative writing from Ohio University in 1965.
In 1957, she married Victor Goedicke, a math and astronomy professor at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Twelve years later, the marriage ended. During her years in Athens, Patricia and her friend Pat Grean published a weekly broadsheet of poems, their own and others'. They remained best friends for the next half century, speaking at least weekly by telephone.
In 1968, during an artist's residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., Patricia met Leonard Wallace Robinson, a New Yorker magazine writer and former fiction editor at Esquire. Twenty years her senior, he became in short order the love and ballast of her life. Her first poetry collection, Between Oceans, was published the same year. "An unusual and startlingly original lyrical talent and much emotional force distinguish these poems," wrote Publishers Weekly. "A remarkable first volume of poetry."
Patricia and Leonard moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to live frugally and to write, and stayed for a dozen years. During that time, she produced four more books of poetry, received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and won the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry from New Letters magazine. She and Leonard both suffered serious health problems during that time. In 1981, in part to reduce the stress of medical and business travel to the States, Patricia accepted a visiting teaching position at the University of Montana, and was later hired in a permanent capacity. They plunged into the life of the community, and their house on McLeod Avenue quickly became a gathering place for friends, many of them writers or aspiring writers. In the spring of 1993, they spent two months in Lake Como, Italy, where Patricia had been awarded an artist's residency at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center.
Leonard died in 1999. As Earth Begins to End, published the next year, was both her tribute to him and a searching, anguished meditation on diminution and death and what might outlast them. "Her theme here is old and enduring love, the gnawed-at bond between longtime mates that survives epic quarrels and the creeping assault of age, and embodies a transcendent eroticism," wrote reviewer Donna Seaman in Booklist.
One of the poems, "The Things I May Not Say," contains this passage: "I would like to speak to you,/the way we used to,/humming into each other's necks, close/as tango dancers, step, glide/embrace/Before you were dropped behind bars/I can't get through."
She was a profoundly engaged and insightful teacher of poetry, and has former students in all parts of the country who count her as a pivotal influence on their work and their lives. (A Patricia Goedicke Scholarship Fund has been established in her honor at the UM, in care of Kate Gadbow, director of creative writing, Liberal Arts 211, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812. A memorial service will be held on campus Sept. 17.)
Before her death, Patricia completed her 13th poetry collection, "The Baseball Field at Night" which is under consideration at several presses.
"Everything Patricia Goedicke looks at sharpens for me and becomes hopeful. She is a believer in our connectedness to the things of this world and to each other," poet Maxine Kumin said of her work.
"Goedicke has been compared to Whitman in her use of the extended line, and because she seeks to bring the entire world into the poem . the profound feel for rhythm, swing, and modulation of the human voice is astonishing and makes Goedicke's poetry a great physical pleasure to read," wrote a reviewer for New Letters.
There was very little about the human experience - personal or universal - that did not interest Patricia. She seemed sometimes to ski her own life, as if it were the most tantalizing and difficult slalom course imaginable; one that demanded (and rewarded) alertness and engagement at every turn.
Even as her body became fragile and besieged, she remained utterly invested in being alive. Among the hundreds of notes, quotations, random written thoughts, plans and descriptions in her files was this note to anyone "who might get drowned in the sludge of my psychic and physical pains . Please be sure to speak of my utter joy - inexpressible - but experienced ... walking barefoot over the grass around the house looking up at the stars and talking to the in-and-out cats in the shadows ... walking on the same barefoot grass in the early mornings ... waking in my sweet bed with the breezes blowing over and no troubles during the night ... Such pleasures ...
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