Writers die, voices remain

April 12, 2007 in Uncategorized

In memory of Kurt Vonnegut, Mr Brilliant’s patron of sorts. I just heard that Vonnegut died yesterday.

In his own famous words from Slaughterhouse-Five, "so it goes." Writers die; thankfully their voices remain.

And so, a poem in his voice:

Requiem

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

-Kurt Vonnegut

[A hat tip to the wondrous Wish Jar Journal for Vonnegut’s poem]

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

2 comments to " Writers die, voices remain "


Marilyn

April 12, 2007 AT 10:14AM

I tried to read Vonnegut when I was younger…just couldn’t do it. Even so, I was sad to read of his passing yesterday. It’s always such a loss to lose a giant voice.

J Ptak

April 13, 2007 AT 3:58PM

Kurt Vonnegut for me was a very funny, very fast, very creative writer. When I discovered him in the early 1970’s I was reading Very Big AND Important Books; old Kurt showed me that you could say an awful lot in a few words. He was one of the few who could get away with a single-paragraph chapter and have it work. He received much grief from many quarters from political stuff later in his life, but what we should remember about him, and the one real great measure of him as a human, was that after his brother and sister-in-law died (within a month of one another) KV and his wife raised his brother’s three kids (in addition to his own three). That’s a big deal in my book, and gets you pretty much a free pass on just about anything else, forever.
So it goes.