A Gotham Tribute to Rachel Hadas

Poets, readers, students, teachers, friends,

Good afternoon, and welcome to Gotham.

It’s an honor to have you here to celebrate the formal retirements and never-retiring arts of Rachel and Shalom, who respectively served Rutgers and Ramapo for over 40 years! (Applause)

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Cassandra Csencsitz and one of the unlikely owners of this restaurant through my husband Bret, who I did NOT meet in a restaurant but in fact doing theatre in Greece some time ago. I won’t say exactly how long lest I distract everyone with the math… (Laughter)

But my love of the classics and poetry have been with me even longer than Bret, and these loves led to my enrolling in a class with Rachel at the 92nd Street Y in 2007.

That Y class was just four weeks, but we stayed in touch, and somewhere along the way she opened up her West End apartment for monthly workshops. I would have a baby and disappear for a while, then show back up at her home with a poem, or half a poem, eager for her to bring me back to life with poetry again.

A poetry class with Rachel is a simple and humanely rigorous affair. An unrhyming, unmetered, or altogether shapeless poem she may gently suggest, “seems like it wants to be a sonnet, or villanelle, or sestina…” At a bit of incomprehensible writing, she may say it’s her job to “play the dumb reader.” And then more often than not she will find a comparison between a student’s poem and a work from the poetry canon, and this is her greatest trick of all.

Although of course it's not a trick. Rachel is a human poetry search engine, and any poem is likely to make her think of another that she knows or loves. She somehow locates the poem among hundreds of books on her heaving shelves then reads it, and by the end each workshop has become an impromptu syllabus of new poems to cherish for life.

And so you leave Rachel’s classes with your head held a little higher, for you’ve communed with Bishop, been compared to Auden, and—as adults—between a day of work and night of family, you can rest assured that the learning need not end.

Thank you, Rachel, for not just always being there, but for always being there with poetry. You’ve made a great difference to me.

—Cassandra Csencsitz, 4/30/23

With Cordelia at the book launch of Poems for Camilla in 2018.