Our Tribute to Dan Cuddy

We lost our editor, Dan Cuddy, after he suffered a heart attack and died on August sixteenth. Dan lived a life defined by unwavering kindness and a passion for creating poetry. Dan’s poems have been published in numerous literary journals. His full-length collection, Handprint on the Window, was published in 2003 by a subsidiary of the Maryland State Poetry & Literary Society, Three Conditions Press.

Born in Baltimore in 1944, Dan’s compassion and love for the written word set him apart as a poet. His particular blend of personal recollection and Baltimore’s textures revealed history, urban places and nature’s cycles. He was also adept at social critique and was gratified whenever his work was selected for publication. A mentor to many younger writers, he established and oversaw the college internship program at The Loch Raven Review.

A constant source of comfort, delight and love, Dan is survived by his wife, Kathy, his children, Erin and Patrick and several grandchildren.

Dan was an elegant and prolific poet and we at The Loch Raven Review mourn him deeply.

Thinking about the Poet

Rain gives way to sunshine…
the August Saturday afternoon doldrums…
Dan’s been dead almost twelve hours now…
I watch puddles of water
slowly evaporating from the sidewalk,
their circumferences growing smaller
with each passing minute
like the stilled heart of the deceased,
as memories fade over time
into paintings of scenes artists hold dear
and fight to preserve with their meticulous brush strokes.
No matter how many times we gaze upon them
in the gallery of our minds,
our recollections begin to darken and blur over time.
Our minds want to grasp all that truly counts—
words spoken in earnest, the smiles
and sincere laughs as brotherhoods
are unconsciously formed between strangers.
What landscapes lurk behind these scenes
we’ll only know when our time comes.
But for now we must embrace what matters,
things the mind defines to be important in the moment
chest pains ripple through the left arm.
Darkness will fall soon enough,
and I’ll find myself sitting in a chair,
staring at a bookcase filled
with the voices of those distanced by death,
as his words start to resound again,
louder than all the other speakers,
reading his latest poem
with its minute, detailed descriptions
and little jabs of humor until I find myself
surrounded by his bubbles of the universe,
drifting clockwise on currents of air,
dancing playfully about the room,
and in one I can still see the reflection of his smile,
read his lips saying these words from beyond:
“Please keep me alive in your memories.”

Jim Doss

Dan, the Diplomat

Not many people have ever struck me as diplomatic as Dan did. What frustrated me seemed not to phase Dan. When my mother, with whom I had a difficult relationship, died, Dan allowed me to write a memorial for her. Normally – aside from book reviews and this tribute to him, of course – we editors do not publish our work in The Loch Raven Review. Many of us are introduced to The Loch Raven Review through submissions we are overjoyed to have published. But when we are asked to join the editorial board, that ends. Dan graciously allowed me to wrestle with my conflicted thoughts and write about my mother. I struggled and he gently understood. Kindly, diplomatically, he told me my first draft was a bit harsh. The next one was better and he published it in the Spring, 2021 issue of The Review.

Here is one of my favorite poems of his. It is written in such a telling way of how he saw himself and struggled with the uncomfortable, the embarrassing work of creating poetry.

Fishing For A Subject
By Dan Cuddy

it is not that you have
no fish to fry
it is just that you do not want
to cook a life in public
everything you have done so far
is tasteful
is impersonal
has little to do with your life
except for the scenery
cliffs and hills and great bodies
of water
that hide so much beneath their reflective blue
claws, teeth, torn fins
beneath the idyllic blue skin

it would be so much easier
being one of the common people
being less pseudo-intellectual
writing plain language, using brand names
that everybody would understand
writing about relationships
father, son
mother, son
man, woman
married or not
deeply drowning in love
or grasping for love
these are the things everyone
wants to hear
especially if you can spear
little naked embarrassments

from Handprint on the Window (Three Conditions Press, 2003)

Caryn Coyle

I’ll miss you, Dan

When I started at The Loch Raven Review, I didn’t know much about publishing and struggled to interpret poetry. Dan was a patient teacher who taught me to proofread a manuscript, write a professional book review, and read between the lines. He is the reason I am an editor (at LRR and at my day job), and I am forever grateful for his mentorship. Thanks to him, I’ve been exposed to great work from authors around the world, and I now understand what this whole poetry fuss is about.

Michael Fialkowski

Wreck
for Dan

As the news of your leaving
this world reaches my inbox,
I imagine some mitochondrial
strand of you exhaled in your
last breath vaulting through
an open window, carried out
to the sea to join the wrack
and fury of hurricane Erin
spinning in the Atlantic, namesake
of your daughter you once carried
in your arms, her winds and tides
bearing you across the wide ocean,
crashing over the rocks and cliffs
of your ancestors, going home.

Matt Hohner

My Tribute to Dan

The loss of Dan was a massive blow to me because I had known him for 55 years. He was part of the furniture of my life. Moreover, probably rare in human relationships, I can’t recall a single instance in which Dan Cuddy and I had an argument or disagreement.

I first met Dan in the fall of 1970 when we both had works published in images, the then evening school literary magazine of Baltimore’s Loyola College (today’s Loyola University), edited by Michael Joyce. At the time, I was aged 22 and a junior attending Loyola as a day student while Dan was 25 and in the night school while working a full-time job downtown.

It was the Vietnam era. By the time I met him, Dan had already served in the U.S. Army in West Germany and had been married for over a year to Kathy. I was an immigrant from Liverpool, England living with my parents while attending Loyola with a student deferment.

Dan and I attended various private poetry critique groups with other aspiring writers in our homes around the Baltimore metropolitan area throughout the 1970s. When I was asked, in 2005, to become an editor at The Loch Raven Review by founding editor Jim Doss, it was a natural that I would think of Dan to invite to be a fellow editor.

During his final illness and the beautiful celebration of his life, I couldn’t help but be impressed with how many writers described to me the help Dan had given them over the years. That alone is testament to the good Dan did in the literary world.

Christopher T. George

Celebrating Dan

I was invited to join Loch Raven Review in 2011, offered a free hand to take the reins of the Poetry Translations section. At one point only the two of us, Dan and I, were left to run the journal. Dan was a peaceful man. Warmhearted, holding no grudge. Helpers drifted in and out, including his son Patrick to help with a much-needed new platform. Patience is a virtue, and so the golden age came when we grew to a crew of nine. Here, in verse form, is how I remember him.

The group met on Fridays
Usually, he appeared
on the screen as the first guest.
So did his poems, days in advance.
They concentrated in great detail
on a person.
Or some philosophical questions.
He wanted to know more.
To learn about the What
and the Who in our poems.
Bulgakov? Oh, he planned to read
more about him.
Sometimes, he phoned to ask
how I was.
What’s the next language I planned
to feature in the journal.
Grateful for all the languages.
Hundreds of foreign poets, translators,
scores of tongues from Amharic, Arabic,
Breton, Bulgarian, name it.
And so many more to discover.
He asked about my poet mother,
my historian son, my homeland Poland.
Curious, concerned that
he didn’t know more.
I see him surrounded by books.
Books all around.
Hard to part.

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

In Memoriam — for Daniel R. Cuddy

Dan Cuddy was one of those rare people who, when he left us, made you sure you had felt a disturbance in The Force. Far from being the perfect human, he was still lovable in the slow, ursine fearlessness that made his humanity irresistible.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Dan could sneak up on us. Utterly subtle and dependably eloquent, as all good poetry is, Dan would, Zelig like, show up in the most unlikely places to support those involved in writing and to share with them his own works in progress.

Poet of nature and its gifts, Dan delved into mystery and found there the secrets unapparent to the average reader or writer. A Jesuit product, Dan was well-versed in the principle of discernment, of carefully considering his observation point in the universe and how that reflection could inform his actions and his poetry. He once said, “I was hooked on poetry [as] a way of creating and contending with an inner life.”

I was fortunate enough in September of 2010 for Dan, unasked, to review my collection, White Asparagus for The Loch Raven Review. He was a good-humored and forgiving critic, far more generous and supportive than I deserved. His insights nailed my intentions and gave me pause for how imperfect my expression of them was.

The power of his language keeps Dan’s memory fresh in our hearts. I still see him now, open-eyed, mouth a little agape, looking at the world with his Irish wonder.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

“The Waking” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1953 by Theodore Roethke.

D. R. Belz

Indentation
-for Dan Cuddy, poet, editor, mentor, friend

I sat with my grandmother at her round kitchen table
as she flipped through the pages of her address book.
She hesitated over a page with a well-worn tab,
then took her eraser and removed an entry,
leaving only pink eraser shavings
and the near-invisible impressions of a name and address.

An old friend, she told me.
He died last spring.

You gave me a book of poetry when we first met.
You were interviewing me for a college internship,
and even a decade after I graduated
you always emailed my .edu address.
You were one of the only people I emailed
with that old .edu,

and the pale letters of the auto-generated greeting still prompt me,
Hey Dan, on every email.

It’s bittersweet to think of you
as being only one Tab key away,
as if you were telling me,

There’s poetry in this.

Ginny Phalen

The featured photo at the top of this page is of Dan and his wife, Kathy, at the Grand Canyon.

Back to Main Loch Raven Review Site