The Groundwater Press
Susan Baran
Our dear friend and long-time collaborator, the poet Susan Baran, died this year, at the age of 78, on February 16, 2026, in Sag Harbor, New York, where she lived with her husband, the poet Marc Cohen. “A small-boned blonde,” the New Yorker magazine called her in 1988: she was also elegant, wise, sharp-witted, kind, generous, and knowing, as befits a decades-long elementary-school teacher and a New Yorker at the heart of the New York School. The Groundwater Press was most fortunate to be able to publish three books of her lively and thoughtful poetry, whose covers are the images above.
Born March 31, 1947, in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx, Susan was a descendant of Robert Charles Sands, an early-nineteenth-century American writer, poet, and member of New York’s Knickerbocker Group among such luminaries as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. Her family’s Polish background also occupied her attention, as attested by a novel still in manuscript, entitled “From Fear Distraught.” For many years, Susan taught literature and science at the Emily Dickinson School—P. S. 75 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—and elsewhere. The Department of Education begged her not to retire, so following her career as a teacher, she continued to work within the New York educational community as a consultant. Her interest in history and the sciences went beyond the classes she taught, informing poems in which she channeled and spoke for Galileo, Audubon, Lincoln, and even Jack Daniels.
She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University in 1980, studying with Derek Walcott, Carol Muske-Dukes, and Richard Howard. At a workshop in the apartment of poet Evelyn Horowitz, a classmate she met in a course with Gilbert Sorrentino, she was introduced to her future husband, the poet Marc Cohen. Starting in the 1980s–90s, Susan founded and directed the remarkable Intuflo Reading Series, featuring notable writers reading to an enthusiastic audience in a hardware store on Columbus Avenue. The New Yorker ran a piece about an evening of poetry there, featuring Michael Malinowitz and Nancy Schoenberger. In the following years, Marc and Susan both joined—and often hosted—a workshop called Ash Wednesdays, organized by the British poet John Ash. Gregarious denizens of the New York School, for decades the two would open their home to guests and for gatherings and parties, whether they were living in an apartment uptown, in Greenwich Village, or in a woodland cottage on eastern Long Island, surrounded by lively cats and birds and friends. The poets and artists of their circles, whose work they supported and who in turn championed their work, included John Ashbery, Gerrit Henry, Star Black, Tom Breidenbach, Robert Dash, John Wells, Darragh Park, Harry Mathews, Jill Hoffman, David Lehman, Dorothy Friedman, Stuart Kaufman, Paton Miller, Jane Freilicher, Ellen Adler, Cornelia and Lukas Foss, as well as Ann Porter and her family.
Susan Baran is the author of an Intuflo Chapbook entitled Harmonious Whole, with a cover by Ellen Adler (Groundwater 1989); and of two poetry collections: The Necessary Boat, cover by Cornelia Foss (Groundwater/Painted Leaf 2000); as well as Racing Daylight, cover by Jane Freilicher (Groundwater 2017). Racing Daylight celebrates her home on Widow Gavits Road in Sag Harbor with sweet details, quietly observed and intensely felt. Other poems reflect on her early days in the city and years teaching in greater New York, particularly during the terror of 9/11. She has dedicated poems to Adler; to their dear friend, the painter Darragh Park; and to poet and art critic Gerrit Henry. Ashbery admired how “the flat land and water of eastern Long Island, where she lives, are constantly stirring” in her writing: “Seldom has the life of poetry coincided so congruently with the life we are trying to live, even as it lives us. Her poetry transfixes and illuminates this mutual act.” Breidenbach describes how she “charts moments, seasons, years, and the lives imbuing them with beauty and meaning . . . the lives of family members, friends, of her cats or a herd of neighborhood cows, or of the various wild birds stopping by her yard.” In these familiars, he says, “she finds persistent cause for wonder, concern, and perspicacity.” Ann Porter found Susan’s poems inhabited by “a scientific curiosity, a keen intelligence, and a childlike integrity which doesn’t alter reality, or flatter it,” without ever seeming cold. With the love and support of Marc and of her sister Jill Baran, who survive her, she weathered serious health issues for decades. In John Ash’s introduction to her first collection, he honors her strength: “The truth and the poignancy of Baran’s work has to do with a very close, personal relationship to the idea of mortality and the words that can transcend it.” All of us who loved her will miss her presence and keep her books by our side.
The Turf
The celadon sirens lure the populace
from glass and concrete palaces.
This you cannot buy, you need no address
to apply, just an open eye.
Sunday, autumn energy propels
pairs of feet from cushioned chairs,
down tricky stairs, a galaxy of stars
across the emerald firmament.
The park is a pattern of light and shade,
a surreal sun flirts from glade to glade.
On the boccie court men roll biased balls
made to swerve – that’s the sport,
the little curve, that keeps the trajectory
unpredictable, the outcome a mystery,
till it’s history like my poems,
like this life charging through homes.
At dusk loss and gain combine.
I try on lives: which one is mine?
Susan Baran
