Pat Dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947.
Ed Berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958.
Dickie Budlong……..my best friend Brucie’s big brother, when we were
five to eight……..killed in Korea, 1953.
Red O’Sullivan……..hockey star & cross-country runner
who sat at my lunch table
in High School……car crash…...1954.
Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan……..my friend, in High School,
Football & Hockey All-State……car crash….1959.
Cisco Houston……..died of cancer……..1961.
Freddy Herko, dancer….jumped out of a Greenwich Village window
in 1963.
Anne Kepler….my girl….killed by smoke-poisoning while playing
the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital
during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist….1965.
Frank……Frank O’Hara……hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966.
Woody Guthrie……dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968.
Neal……Neal Cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night
in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969.
Franny Winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the Detroit-Ann Arbor
Freeway, returning from the dentist….Sept. 1969.
Jack……Jack Kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969.
My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245510
This poem completely eschews all the traditional conventions of the elegy. There is no lamentation, no romanticization, and no solace; it is simply a list of people who died, their importance, how they died, and when they died. "People Who Died" seems similar to "Out, Out, Out-" in that they both deal with death, but both purposefully avoid the typical characteristics of an elegy. The final line -- "My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now." -- helps reveal the true message of this poem. People, both normal and famous, die all the time (exemplified in the body of the poem); their deaths pained the writer and linger with him still. It is also worth noting that Berrigan simply calls the dead "friends", rather than glorifying them post-mortem.
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