Claudia Ann Seaman
Every time I hear or read “The Claudia Ann Seaman Poetry Award,” I picture a Victorian cameo, a delicately carved portrait of a graceful, artistic-looking woman with long white hair gathered up loosely in a French twist. I imagine that this Claudia was a gentle Hudson Valley poet who left her family fortune to future generations of young, aspiring poets. If only it were so. The real Claudia’s curly hair was still a deep, glinting brown when we lost her, at age 24, in August 1982. Our grief was shared by many relatives, friends, colleagues, and neighbors who also shared our need to find a way to publicly preserve Claudia’s memory, to express love and support, and salvage a future from a cruelly shortened life. What came to mind was poetry, that age-old balm to the spirit and conduit for bruised emotions; the link to dreams and recollections.
Everyone in our family was a word lover enamored of conversation, teasing, jokes, complaints, songs, and of course, books. Claudia and I grew up with books and art, music and magazines, and parents who read steadily and happily. Each of us wrote in one form or another, at one time or another, without coercion, composing poems, stories, diaries, letters, and various think pieces. Claudia was the dreamiest, given to spontaneous creation and performance, particularly on car trips. A slender, big-eyed, full-voiced, and determined little girl, she would curl up in the corner of the back seat behind Dad and make up and then sing long, complicated, and romantically tragic songs about cowboys, horses, sunsets, and showdowns. Poetry, music, and horseback riding became Claudia’s passions and were her solace through the hormonal storm of adolescence. We parted ways when we graduated from high school and went off to art school in Kansas City, and Claudia and our parents moved from Poughkeepsie to Paris. This rather dramatic separation was the start of our uneven correspondence. I wrote Claudia more often than she wrote me, so I teased and pestered her for letters, chiding her for making research too difficult for our future biographers by not leaving records of our brilliant thoughts about painting, poetry, the elegance of Paris, the crassness of Kansas City; our self-doubt, scorn from society, and grand intentions. We continued our fitful but affectionate exchange of letters after my family returned to Poughkeepsie, and I left Kansas City for Chicago. Claudia had been writing poetry all along and now began to send me her poems, either laboriously typed or carefully copied in her quirky, squared-off, back-slanting handwriting. Her poems were emotional and dramatic, sometimes even sublime. Claudia often seemed out of our time, a bit ethereal, impractical, sometimes intractable, even inexplicable. She was quick-changing and elusive and loved the rush of speed and motion: the perfect canter of a horse, the acceleration of a motorcycle, the thrill and doom of imperfect love. Her poems capture her complexity, intelligence, humor and penchant for romance, mysticism, nature, and beauty. And it was her poems that survived the fire that caused her death and, in turn, helped us survive our sorrow. When disease is the catalyst for death, the bereaved pledge donations to fund research for its cure. In our case, we were able to support an already existing remedy, the healing art of poetry, by encouraging and rewarding young poets. We hope that this collection of Claudia’s poems will give the award established in her memory a context and an identity. Now when a hopeful poet tries to imagine the Claudia of the Claudia Ann Seaman Poetry Award, they too may envision a delicately carved cameo, but it will portray a beautiful young woman with dreamy gray eyes gazing off into the distance, just about to smile. Donna Seaman
June 1992 Source: Seaman, Claudia Ann . “their endless shine.” Ed. Donna Seaman. DJS Press, 1992. xi-xiii.
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