Rennie McQuilkin OBITUARY
Former Connecticut Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin, a resident of Bloomfield’s Seabury community, died at Hartford Hospital on Monday, July 3, of complications from hip surgery. He had been battling stage four male breast cancer with spread to the lungs (and, later, to the bones) since 2018. Born in 1936, Rennie was the son of William Winters McQuilkin, who, as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Bausch & Lomb, would later oversee the introduction of the first mass-produced soft contact lens, and the former Eleanor Godwin Atterbury, also a poet. He was the grandson of the Rev. Dr. Harmon Hudson McQuilkin, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Orange, New Jersey, and the former Elizabeth Rhinehart, who often played the organ at services; and of Robert Rennie Atterbury, a governor of the New York Stock Exchange and partner in the stock brokerage firm of Van Emburgh & Atterbury, and the former Eleanor Godwin Dodge. After spending his first two years in New York City, Rennie was raised in Rochester, New York, where he attended the Allendale School before matriculating at Princeton. He later attended Harvard Law School, before thinking better of it, and Columbia University, where he received a Masters in English Literature. Rennie began his teaching career at the Horace Mann School before heading north to Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, later moving down the hill to its sister school, Abbot Academy, and then farther south again to Loomis-Chaffee and, finally, Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut. In 1992, having retired from teaching, Rennie served as founding artistic director of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, held at Farmington’s Hill-Stead Museum, just up Mountain Road from the school. Named for the famed enclosed garden, originally designed by Beatrix Farrand, within which the events took place each summer, the festival brought to its eager Hartford audience leading lights such as Donald Hall, Patricia Smith, James Merrill, Marilyn Nelson, Kevin Young, Natasha Trethewey, and Richard Blanco, along with exciting up and coming writers, and talented college and high school students. For two decades, it was a landmark event in American poetry. He stepped away from the festival in the aughts to found the independent poetry press Antrim House, which has championed the work of writers from around the state and the region. In the course of his own career as a poet, Rennie was a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, and The American Scholar, among other journals and quarterlies, and was the author of some twenty collections. Characterized by Richard Wilbur as “spare yet warm-hearted and admirably accurate” with “a honed sense of the New England region,” Rennie’s work won him grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Barack Obama’s second Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco wrote of some of Rennie’s most recent work, that it “brilliantly and powerfully juxtaposes the intimacy of family life with the enmity of our troubled times,” and Eamon Grennan had this to say: “With undaunted courage, insight, and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet’s stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care.” Pre-deceased in 2023 by his wife of 63 years, the former Sarah Aagedall Couch, he is survived by his three children, Eleanor McQuilkin Burns (Dr. Archibald S. Perkins), of Rochester; Sarah McQuilkin Leverett, of Colorado Springs; and Robert Rennie McQuilkin, Jr. (William B. Russell, Jr.), of Tuxedo Park, New York; by seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild; as well as by the many hundreds of students he taught and the scores of writers whose work he edited and published. Carmon Funeral Home of Windsor has care of the arrangements. For condolences, please visit www.carmonfuneralhome.com.
