Ann Arbor homes of former resident poets & authors
Last Sunday I did something I rarely do- I hopped aboard a small van and toured Ann Arbor. The trip narration was provided by man-about-town Steve Thorp and the excursion was sponsored by the AA Book Fair. In about two hours, we visited over 10 home sites where noted authors and poets had resided in town and the Fairview Cemetery where the grave of Robert Hayden is inconspicuously located.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that Robert Frost lived in Ann Arbor, on two separate occasions. And later acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller, when he entered the U-M in 1934, called an upstairs apartment at 411 N. State Street his home.
But I was surprised to learn about the residence of author Betty Smith, 1314 Broadway, who's published works include "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
A great, world-class university, like the U-M , is grounded on a solid foundation of academic excellence set by distinguished faculty and administrators. Where First Presbyterian Church of AA stands proudly in a wooded lot at 1432 Washtenaw, Issac Newton Demmon, a mathematics and later history professor at Michigan for 45 years, lived in what a peer called one of the town's "picturesque, pleasant and cultivated homes."
Demmon hosted poet Frost in 1921 during one of his residencies in Ann Arbor and the former passed away in that year. A summary of the U-M professor's illustrious career in the Michigan Alumnus magazine ran nine pages. His colleagues noted his death "crowned a life of incessant labor, and enriched by such a depth of experience as few men, and only big men, can know."
Harriette Simpson Arnow, best remembered for the novel "The Dollmaker," moved with her husband, a former journalist with the defunct Detroit Times, to a comfortable home in Ann Arbor Township in the 1940s. Other Ann Arbor writing notables included poet in residence W.H. Auden, Jane Kenyon, 2896 Newport Road; and Joseph Brodsky at 309 Wesley Street.
More recently, Robert Hayden, an African-American poet who was raised in Detroit, lived at 1201 Gardner, Ann Arbor and taught at Michigan in the 1970s. Many Americans admire Hayden's widely anthologized poem about his father, "Those Winter Sundays," or his powerful poem about the slave trade, "Middle Passage." A Hopwood Award recipient, perhaps Hayden's most notable tenure was as a consultant in poetry to the U.S. Library of Congress, later changed to poet laureate. He was the first African-American in the post.
Hayden was ahead of his time as a frequent traveler on the City's bus system. He would ride the bus from State and William to Packard and Gardner, just a few steps from his home. Hayden's poor eyesight only limited his driving.
