Poetry & Writing

A collection of musings on Iris from Iris's creative writing community. Quotes are attributed.

Phyllis: I met Iris in the late ’60s. In my first memory of her, we are on a bus—probably the First Avenue bus—going uptown after a Ted Berrigan poetry workshop. It was in the winter, February or early March, and I remember her sitting there wearing her antique lambs wool coat with her lilac beret and a scarf that also contained a fair amount of lilac. There was always lilac around Iris. I had never seen the color all that much until I met her, but then I fell in love with it and very I soon had a dress in a lilac-y print and a canvas bag in the most lilac-iest of lilacs ever seen. And lilac tights. Carter and I started hanging out with Iris at Ted’s workshop. Afterwards, we’d go to Ratner’s on Second Ave for cabbage soup. And there were gatherings of Iris’s poetry friends at her apartment in the 70s, somewhere on the Upper East Side. Soon after, Carter and I moved into an apartment together on East Fifth Street. In 1968, I think. It was June by then and we threw Iris a surprise birthday party—the only surprise birthday party I’ve ever thrown for anyone. Iris was a truly remarkable person with a deep sense of language and an extraordinary sense of humor. Once she brought me a recipe that she made up for a chicken dish she named Infantile Chicken Bordeaux. We made it together and it was absolutely extraordinarily delicious. We made it several times and it was fantastic every time, but then we lost the recipe and could no longer make it. But we talked about it almost every time we saw each other, for the next fifty-plus years. And the name remains as a sign of Iris’s playfulness with language, English, of course, but also French.

Carter: There were lots of young poets at Ted’s workshop, which was part of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, one of the landmarks of the downtown scene. Everyone was enthusiastic and lively, yet Iris stood out as one of the very best of the bunch. We loved her poems and everyone loved collaborating with her, which was one of the things we did in those days. Many poems had two or even three authors. I published a series of mimeo magazines and I always included Iris, along with Ted, John Ashbery, Jim Carroll, and all the usual suspects.
Last year, the editor of The Café Review, a poetry magazine in Maine, got in touch with me. He had noticed Iris’s poems in one of my magazines and wanted her email address, which I gave him. The upshot is that he included two of her poems in his Review. They are beautiful. “The Poem Writes Itself” ends with these stanzas:
Each perfect frame breached with words burning without flame
In my bones fathoming the shape shouldering the crest of time

Phyllis: I remember afternoons sitting with Iris by the lake in Central Park and a trip we took to Cambridge for the weekend. I don’t remember why, just that we had a wonderful time. We always had a wonderful time together. She was so great to be around. I don’t remember anyone ever having an argument with her, neither I nor anyone else. After Iris left New York, she always visited us wherever we happened to be living. In the 1970s, when we were in a loft on Broadway, between 17th and 18th Streets, Iris came to the city every week for a dance class she was teaching. She had the key to the loft so she could get in if we weren’t there or were sleeping when she arrived. There was a rolled-up foam-rubber mattress that she would unroll and go to sleep on. Sometimes we would go to the Cedar Tavern, on University Place, for hamburgers and French fries and humongous globs of self-serve blue cheese dressing on our tossed salads.
Iris was an extraordinary poet, one of the best poets of her time, and I think it would be wonderful if someone would look through her poetry and put together a book. Also, her love of dance was a constant throughout her life. I believe that she derived great strength from it.
We talked less often as the years went by, but, regardless of how much time elapsed between conversations or visits, it was always as if we had just spoken the previous day. My last conversation with Iris was very strange. We had made a date to walk around in our respective towns and talk while walking. For some reason, I didn't feel like walking, so I drove and at some point I pulled over and just sat in the car. As I was talking to Iris, an amazing thing happened. It was a summer day and there were quite a few people around. Suddenly a balloon without a human being attached floated by and disappeared behind a building. It was lilac. Iris’s color. Or perhaps it was Iris herself.
Over the past couple of years, I formed a list in my mind of all the things I wanted to talk with her about the next time we spoke. It would have been a great conversation, a conversation I couldn’t possibly have had with anyone else. We never had that conversation, and I will always, always regret that.

Carter: After the St. Marks period, Iris never published much. To write her poems was enough. For her, poetry was a way of being, not a career. This is from “Like Planets,” one of the recent poems that appeared in The Café Review:
When the news is good
joys rise up like planets in my breasts
I travel with the stars, whirling, whirring

A figurehead with tousled, sculpted curls

Among the waves

Carter Ratcliff and Phyllis Derfner

I had the great fortune of feeling the warmth and radiance of Iris Rifkin-Gainer as poet, artist, and dancer during the past almost-twenty years of my life. Iris was a member of Bucknell’s Poetry Reading Group for Faculty and Staff for several years. For a year (or more than a year?––what is time?), Iris and I also read and wrote poem drafts alongside each other and shared them in a Poetry Writing Group. Iris was a luminous presence, someone who deeply felt the joy of growth and seasonal change and cycliality––she gave her intellect, her artistry, her accepting warmth, and her sense of curiosity and inspiration to any community she entered. The fragment of poem-in-progress below, which Iris wrote and shared with our little group of working writers more than a decade ago, not only speaks to Spring personified, but also shows Iris herself: the light that she reveled in and radiated outward:

then there's the light you throw at us in streaks and blurts

times of day transfigured by your own

and the human hunger for always more

the breath of dusk and early morning filtering through blinds

a bauble balanced on my lid begins another day of Spring

–Iris Rifkin-Gainer

K.A. Hays

While I always enjoyed seeing Iris at different social gatherings and Bucknell events, I knew her best as the convener of the Feminist Fiction Reading Group. In that role, she was a charming, funny and most engaging convener. She made sure the books we chose to read were available; she facilitated our discussions with discernment, patience and humor; and she wrote summaries of each meeting that never failed to capture the complexities of the issues we discussed. It was a time of great sharing of feminist experiences and ideals, and a time I will always remember and treasure.

Martha Holland

When I re-read Iris’s two poems, “The Poem Writes Itself” and “Like Planets,” published in the summer 2022 edition of the Café Review, I sensed something, well, Shakespearean about them. That is, on the small canvas on which they were written, there was a whole world there, in each of them. And more, a trying to get right into the universe itself, into Everything. Maybe her sense of Time’s limitations arising with her illness in her own life is what percolates through there, Time is the subject and Time is like this modern stylus writing the poems for Iris, she the lovely amanuensis.

So, hello there, Iris, here we go. This is for you:

By William Shakespeare & Allan Appel

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
----and actually much more frequently than that ----
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
----or just feel cranky, grouchy, and miss your smile ----
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
----and wonder why the poem just won’t write itself ----
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
----and so wish you were here and the planets aligned---
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
----or like someone who could reach in there and pull you back---

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
--- and it grows, your sweet constancy, sent from wherever you are

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

----you always helped us be at more peace with that---

With what I most enjoy contented least;

---because that was a secret I sensed you possessed---

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

---even then, no, especially then, you had a quiet grace, a touch---
Haply I think on thee,

--- your every-day serene-ness ---

and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

--- and right here too where I still send my failed morning prayers your way---

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

---- as you wrote, like ‘the jewel drenched with words in the pearly morning light’ ---

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Allan Appel

Iris was a force for good in the world. I met her back when I was regularly attending the Feminist Fiction Reading Group at Bucknell. Most of my favorite memories of gatherings of FFRG were at Iris and Bob's house. As much as I appreciated Iris' organization of the group and her contributions to our discussions of whatever literary work we were focused on, I appreciated her simple and straightforward humanity even more. Iris always welcomed everyone with a smile; her positive countenance made you happy to be there, happy to be alive to experience the group conversation.

My mother lived with me and attended FFRG several times; in her mid- to late 90s then, Mom was a bit on the shy side and a bit hard of hearing. After the get-together, Mom would always tell me how much she appreciated Iris' sunny disposition and her interest in Mom as a person. Grace, happiness, care, inclusiveness, and a genuine interest in other people -- these are all things I associate with Iris. My life is richer for having known her, and the world is a much better place for her spirit's presence.

Jamie Hendry

I have known Iris for many years, but didn't really get to know her until I joined the Feminist Fiction Reading (FFRG) group six or seven years ago. I always thought of her as a gentle soul and an independent free spirit with a dancing mind and body. I also knew she committed heart and soul to being a mom, which I appreciated because I felt the same way.

Iris's fellow readers in FFRG will miss her deeply. Her comments on the books always brought to light something we had not noticed or gave us a different way to interpret what we had seen. Her write-ups of our discussions were nothing short of heroic, and they showed how much she cared about the group and making sure those who had not attended would not miss the highlights of our always-stimulating discussions. She was at the very heart of FFRG and will always be among us in our own hearts.

Elaine Hopkins

I came to know Iris better when I joined the Feminist Fiction Reading book group (FFRG) after my retirement. Even though writing summaries of each of our discussions was a burden for her, she felt it was important; and I know her summaries were much appreciated by those who could not attend the meetings. Iris convened the meetings and she kept them on topic and made sure we always settled on the next book and meeting time before we went our separate ways. We came together for the laughter and intellectual discussion but were able to do so because she organized us. She kept the group going, and it is having her as a role model that will keep us going without her.

Iris was an impressive reader and writer. When I disliked a book she liked, or vice versa, I always learned something important from her perceptions. Her write-ups of our discussions clarified points that the actual discussions had left murky. In response to one of her essays, Chris Woodruff once wrote, "Thanks once again for your diligence in deploying your critical acumen to produce a thoughtful essay which you modestly claim to be a summary of our wandering discussion." Long-time FFRG member and literature professor Mardi Mumford missed the discussion of a controversial book and wrote, "These are just my thoughts after reading Iris's amazing summary and interpretation of the novel. As we all know, she deserves a blue ribbon and a round of applause not only for the above, but for all that she writes." Iris was not just the convener of the FFRG, she was the soul of the FFRG. We were already missing her influence as her illness was making her full participation difficult. The group will survive her absence because we will strive to live up to her expectations of us.

I am so grateful that I got to know Iris through this group. I got to witness her many talents, her gift for friendship, and her devotion to her family. She truly made the world a better place.

Genie Gerdes

Iris was a wonderful presence in my and Tania's lives at Bucknell. Spiritosa, as the Italians say: full of life, full of spirit. A poet, indeed. You and she are in our thoughts.

Will Schutt, Bucknell U. Stadler Poetry Center Fellow, 2009-2011

I keep thinking of Iris – so aptly named – for the way she brought beauty into the world:
In everything she did and in the way she moved through the world.

I remember when Steve and I came to your home – it must have been early in our time in
Lewisburg – that she had a basket of beautiful house slippers she had collected, just be
able to offer those to guests. This is one of the many fond memories I have of her that I
have been holding up to the light again, in the wake of her passing and in trying to honor &
kindle her presence, her spirit.

Shara McCallum

A Tribute to Iris in the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts News & Events Newsletter at Bucknell University, April 17, 2023

Thanks to Andrew Ciotola

Iris and fellow readers
As always, Iris’s remarkable sensibility in putting together her analyses of the group’s discussions leave me marveling at her capacity to “nail” the essence of the discussion, at the same time adding her own trenchant observations to contributions made by everyone in this (to me, amazing) group.

I don’t know of any other reading group in which summaries and analyses of meetings have been, and are, preserved, in the way Iris Gainer has been doing all these many years.

In effect, Iris has been not only “summarizing” the conversations and observations of all of us, she’s been adding to – and yes, often improving on -- what all of us have been “creating” as our group has been meeting, discussing, and analyzing books, over many months and years -- how many now? (Iris and others among us will the exact number of years; I’ve lost track.)

I know I speak for our whole group when I observe that her work has been a “labor of love,” with an emphasis on the word “labor” – which leaves all of us in debt to her willingness to invest so much time and trouble on our behalf.

In effect, what she’s done is not only to give us a record what’s been said and done – she, and all the rest of us—have actual created “a book of us.”

It’s a ‘book’ of our group’s achievement – more specifically, of our group’s steady progression of understanding and acknowledgement of the critical importance of reading, and of understanding—and yes, of talking about what’s been written. I like to imagine that we read for the benefit of our children, families, friends, neighbors – and yes, of the world….

I think that words of all sorts have incredible power, a power so great we sometimes forget it’s there, and that we rarely acknowledge what it’s capable of doing.

And getting back to Iris, where all of this started, I think I speak for all of us when I acknowledge the great gift she’s given us all---and that all of us have given each other. Thank you everyone!

Anonymous, Member of the Feminist Fiction Reading Group, August 2016