Michael Heffernan, Man of Letters
1942-2024
The poet, Michael Heffernan has died. He was 81 years old. Attended by family, he was briefly in the care of Circle of Life Hospice, in Springdale, Arkansas. Dr. Heffernan suffered from complications of Alzheimer’s and died peacefully on the afternoon of Friday, the 3rd of May, with Ann by his side.
Born on 20 December 1942, in Detroit, he was the son of Susan (Schneider) and Joseph Heffernan. A native Detroiter, he was a long-time resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas where he taught for 32 years in the graduate writing program at the University of Arkansas. He’d been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Bread Loaf Scholar, and the recipient of three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 he won the Porter Prize for Poetry.
He authored a dozen collections of original, prize winning and critically acclaimed poetry, from his first book in 1974 The Cry of Oliver Hardy and Love’s Answer, which won the Iowa Prize in 1994, to The Bureau of Divine Music, published as part of the Made in Michigan series by Wayne State University Press in 2011. He published five books with Salmon Poetry in Ireland, the last was The Night-Watchman's Daughter.
He pressed the limits of traditional forms, sonnets, sestina’s and iambic pentameters, in the diction of the everyday conversation and theological mystery. His work was informed by his voracious reading; few subjects were not worthy of his attention over time. His constant advice to his students and would-be writers was, “read and invent.” His life was spent in service to that dictum.
Michael Heffernan counted syllables, stressed and unstressed, saw metaphor in most things, and believed in the power and gifts of language. All of his life he kept up a running conversation with himself, and anyone in earshot willing to listen, in search of the essential meaning of things. Wry and irreverent, intimate, and professorial, it was informed by his curiosities and erudition, no less his religious praxis and Jesuit training. Some of this life-long colloquy became poems, some lectures, some correspondence, and some became the easy and instructive conversations he carried on with spouses and children, students and colleagues, and a wide circle of bookish and appreciative friends. When none was available, he’d amiably hold forth with perfect strangers on a variety of topics from the Fall of Rome to the dramas of Shakespeare, Mozart sonatas, and the poems of Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman or W.B. Yeats, many of which he knew by heart.
Michael Joseph Heffernan grew up on Morell Street, in southwest Detroit. He attended Holy Redeemer Catholic School, where he also served as an altar boy. He graduated from University of Detroit Jesuit High school in 1960, and graduated in 1964 from University of Detroit where he studied English literature and Language. He studied briefly at Oxford and held a PhD in English from University of Massachusetts.
After his studies, he travelled widely in Europe returning many times, especially to Paris and Ireland. He started a writing program as a joint venture with University of Galway in Ireland and the University of Arkansas in 1988. He shared his love of Paris with month long stays at the Irish Cultural Center in Paris with friends and anyone interested from 2010-2018.
After receiving his doctorate, he returned to Michigan to take up a teaching fellowship at Oakland University in Rochester where he taught from 1967 until 1969 before taking a position at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg Kansas where he taught and edited The Midwest Quarterly from 1969-1986.
In Pittsburg he met and married Kathy Spigarelli in 1975 and they had three sons. The family moved to Fayetteville AR, in August of 1986 at the invitation of Miller Williams and Jim Whitehead who had started one of the nation’s earliest MFA Programs in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. He retired from teaching in 2018. It was in Fayetteville, “Heff” and Kathy raised their three sons, Joseph, James (Leigh), and Mickey (Ashley Creek), who survive. They divorced in 1994. He finally married the love of his life, Ann Pinson Heffernan on May 10, 2003, and they were married 21 years.
In addition to his wife and sons, he is survived by three grandchildren, Thomas and Peter Heffernan and Elizabeth Perry, a stepdaughter Natalie Luer, his sister, Anne Marie (John MacDougall). He also leaves two nieces, Susan and Kathleen and a nephew, John, and their families. Also surviving are a host of former colleagues and students, dear friends, avid readers, and fellow writers who join with his family in mourning the death of a good man and distinguished man of letters, while giving thanks for his life among them, and for the legacy of his work in words which outlives him on the shelves of libraries throughout the English-speaking world.
A lifelong if occasionally lapsed Catholic, his Funeral Mass will be said at St. Joseph Catholic Church, 1722 N. Starr Dr. in Fayetteville, on Friday May 24, at 11 AM. The service will also be live streamed. There will be a visitation at Moore's Chapel, 206 W. Center also in Fayetteville, on Thursday May 23 from 5-7. He is to be buried in Fairview Cemetery around the corner from his home in Fayetteville following the Mass. There will be a reception at Millar Lodge on Mt. Sequoyah from 1-4:30, where we can share stories and poems.
Pallbearers will be Randolph Thomas, David Lowmiller, John Cylkowski, Joshua Whitton, Christian Perry, and Thomas and Peter Heffernan.
Gifts in Michael's memory may be made to St. Jude's Children's Hospital (www.stjude.org), Alzheimer Association (wwwalz.org), or Circle of Life hospice( 901 Jones Rd., Springdale, AR 72762).
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