Michael Paul Goldman

GOLDMAN - Michael. Michael Goldman, poet and Princeton professor, died at home in Manhattan on August 17th. The sun was shining over Central Park and Eleanor Bergstein, his wife of 58 years, was there. He was 87. Michael was both a poet and a major scholar of Shakespeare, Ibsen and modern drama. He was the author of seven widely praised books: Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama, a National Book Award nominee, which proposed a theory of drama describing the play as text that moderated between actor and audience; The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama, winner of the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism in 1976; Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy; and Ibsen, The Dramaturgy of Fear, also a Winner of the George Jean Nathan Prize, in 2000; and On Drama: Boundaries of Drama, Borders of Self. He published poems in The New Yorker (the first at age 19), the TLS and other publications, and his work was included in The Best American Poetry 2003. He was poetry editor of The Nation from 1965 to 1968 and published two volumes of poetry, First Poems, and At the Edge. For him, poetry lay at the heart of everything.

He graduated first in his class at Stuyvesant High School and went to Columbia College planning to study physics but switched to English, working with Lionel Trilling and others and became a poet instead. He won First Class Honors in English at Cambridge University, received a PhD from Princeton University, then taught at Columbia and Queens College before settling in as a full professor at the Department of English at Princeton from 1975 until his retirement in 2005.

He was revered by his students, many of whom became accomplished in fields as varied as serious drama and television sitcoms. One, the playwright Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out), said he read Michael’s Ibsen book each time before starting a new play, and the television creator Jennie Snyder Urman (Jane the Virgin) unequivocally credits him with having inspired her career by believing in her before she believed in herself.

Michael wrote "The Kellerman's Anthem" in the movie “Dirty Dancing” while traveling on an all-night train to a Shakespeare lecture, at the urgent behest of his wife, Ms. Bergstein, who was writer and co-producer of the movie.

A trained actor with a brilliant baritone voice, he sang Schubert lieder and show tunes, did radio acting and read poetry on the air for NPR. He was famous for being deeply honorable, hilariously witty and unfailingly kind - attributes that rarely go together. For years he loved playing in his weekly baseball and football games. He was a wonderful dancer.

He was adored by his wife, who would say without hesitation he was the most beautiful man in the world, both inside and out. They met one night when he was watching a Yankee doubleheader in a friend's apartment. She sat down to wait it out, he walked her home and they talked for many hours. That night he had a dream that he was getting married. The bride walked down the aisle and lifted her veil. It was someone he'd never seen before. He woke abruptly in a cold sweat thinking, "How will I explain this to Eleanor?"

The service will be held on Friday August 25th at 11AM at Riverside Memorial Chapel, 180 West 76th Street.

Contributions can be made in Michael's memory to Médecins Sans Frontières.

The following poem, never before published, was his Christmas gift to her.

Dream Light

a private poem for Eleanor

By Michael Goldman

Say the bougainvillea

are out shopping

and hard boiled eggs

are being consumed widely

and a few angels are flying around

declaring some of us to be

honorary angels.

It's what we call

falling in love

because, believe me,

one falls.

You see this button?

I was made

an honorary angel.

Some find themselves in furtive, brutal

declarations;

some in extensive

conversations,

others, disarmed,

in sleep.

Oh yes, it happened first before my eyes

all the brightness of the moon or Shakespeare

or a line drive that wins a certain game forever

or the flash that once gave all the planets

their daily light.

But I saw nothing.

For me it happened in my sleep

I woke and found it permanent and true

and true meant what true truly meant

for the first time and forever.

P. S. If you know her even slightly

you will have little difficulty understanding

why an angel makes an appearance

in this poem.

In a world that is-- you know,

the world-- how baffling

one instant of pure clarity becomes

and yet sufficient for a lifetime.

And yet what lit my dream to you?

What light whose eyes my eyes?

Let me try to get the physics

one more time.

The light in my eyes was your eyes

as in my now twice truer college motto,

in lumine tuo videbimus lumen

the light by which all other lights are seen.

That textbook dream

filled with the shock of marrying

has served to light me every day since then.

As I slept, you were already in my heart.

Christmas, 2016