Santa Fe poet's work celebrated 'love and relationships'

Jul. 27—Victor di Suvero saw the desert as a fertile environment for growing literary endeavors, poetry and love. It's one reason he named his collection of poetry From the Sea to Santa Fe.

The longtime city resident, who played a role in creating PEN New Mexico, the New Mexico Book Association and the Live Poets Society, died July 6 at a Santa Fe hospice center of natural causes.

He was 94.

"His work wasn't ironic or provocative in general," his son, Alexander di Suvero, said in a telephone interview from California. "There was some of that early on, but mostly he was about celebrating love and relationships."

He said his father long believed "everything is possible, everything can be perceived as beautiful."

Victor di Suvero also ran Pennywhistle Press in both San Francisco and Santa Fe. In 2009 Pennywhistle published We Came to Santa Fe, an anthology of short essays by notable Santa Feans who recounted their reasons for moving to the city.

"That was one of his visions that came together," said friend and poet Joan Logghe, whose first book of poems, What Makes a Woman Beautiful, was published by Pennywhistle Press in 1993.

Loegghe, who was Santa Fe's first poet laureate from 2010-12, said di Suvero "never gave up, he always had a project or an idea. Wherever he was, he was the consummate poet and performer."

Born in Italy in 1927, di Suvero and his family fled war-torn Europe and Asia in early 1941, arriving in San Francisco on the ship President Cleveland. Young, bored and anxious to do something to help the war effort, he first learned the way of the sea in the Merchant Marine.

After the war, a chance encounter with American poet Kenneth Rexroth — di Suvero said he won a copy of one of Rexroth's books in a raffle and asked the poet to sign it — influenced a decision to pursue poetry as a passion, even if he had to hold down a day job as a businessman.

"He was like a weekend poet," Alexander di Suvero said of his father, who he considers a "pre-Beat poet."

"He was a banker, a real estate developer by week and a bohemian by weekend, which alienated him from both artists and bankers, because he sort of had one foot in each camp," the younger di Suvero said.

Victor di Suvero moved with his late wife Barbara Windom to Santa Fe in the late 1980s, having first discovered the city during an Easter 1969 sojourn. They moved to Tesuque and later to Alcalde, raised horses and helped mount Poetry Week events in the city while publishing the works of "known and unknown poets" through Pennywhistle Press, Logghe said.

Victor di Suvero said poetry became a path for him to explore the various parts of his life. "For me poetry is always the wild child," he wrote in a Gale Literature autobiographical essay. "It is the art that always sees things over the edge of the horizon."

He wrote poems about such daily concerns as balancing time commitments, the joy of sunshine lighting up a body and spirit and how sudden death may come for someone playing a game of tennis.

He also wrote about love, penning poems to dead friends and lovers and living relatives.

"To be loving one must reach into corners one did not know existed in one's own heart," he wrote in one poem.

In 2019 he was one of the artists who received a Governor's Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Poetry, he told The New Mexican at the time, "makes it possible for people to do things they would not be able to do if they did not have poetry to help."

Even in his later days, living in Brookdale Santa Fe, di Suvero deemed himself poet laureate of the place and read poetry to other residents, Logghe said.

"I was very touched by that," she said.

A memorial service is scheduled for Aug. 22 from 2-4 p.m. at the New Mexico School for the Arts. For information, call Brandy Avila at 505-316-3736.