HART, McGAHEY

Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Sunday, May 07, 2006 at 11:11:18 :

Marin Independent Journal
May 23, 1996

Lawrence Hart
Poetry teacher

Several of his lectures will be published as a memorial to poetry teacher and Activist movement founder Lawrence Hart of San Rafael, who died at age 95 on May 13 after a long period of declining health.

He died less than six months after the death of Jeanne McGahey, his wife, his pupil, and a prize-winning poet.

Hart was a widely recognized and effective writing teacher, according to his son, poet and environmental writer John Hart, who will publish the memorial lectures. "He was really a roving teacher-philosopher, who never quite fit in any system. But he had very strong ideas about how to make language work, and taught whomever and however he could."

Hart taught adult classes at Univesity of California, Mills College and College of Marin, and children's classes at Mills and in Marin County schools.

His Lawrence Hart Seminar (first called the Activist Seminar), was at the heart of what poet W. H. Auden called the Activist Movement in poetry, which called for "sensory reporting" of what one actually sees. "Lawrence's standards were very high," says his son. "He was convinced that if poetry wasn't superb, it hardly mattered."

Many of Hart's pupils achieved broad acknowledgment and success, including McGahey, Rosalie Moore, Robert Barlow and Robert Horan.

Born in Colorado in 1901, Hart was schooled in Colorado, Oregon and California. He worked as a cub reporter on the Santa Rosa Democrat, founded a short-lived literary magazine in San Francisco. amd interviewed visiting literary figures for the San Francisco News ad the San Franciscan.

He wrote poetry himself in his early years, but he later "assiduously destroyed what he had written. He said his own poems were awful," John Hart says. "Teaching was his medium. The tragedy of his life is that he did his teaching one on one, and little of what he taught is written down."

Hart married McGahey in 1944. They lived in San Rafael from 1951 onward.

No funeral services will be held. An invitational event will be scheduled when the memorial lectures have been published.