Frances Lefevre Waldman

Twentieth-century poet, translator, and participant in Greek and American literary communities

Frances LeFevre reported on a poetry class to her daughter. The letters eventually became a book, Dearest Annie, You Wanted a Report on Berkson’s Class. Their subject was the work occurring in Bill Berkson’s New School workshop: assignments, discussion, and other writers learning and testing their practice. A mother writing to a daughter was also a participant making a record of a literary community. [1,2]

Her involvement in literature began well before those New York letters. The University of Michigan Library identifies her as a translator of Greek literature who worked with artists and poets seeking to bring ancient Greek theater before modern audiences in the 1930s. This activity connects literary translation with performance. It required texts to move between languages and settings, rather than remaining only objects of scholarly reading.

Frances’s family life placed her within the Sikelianos network. She married Glafkos, the son of Eva Palmer and Angelos Sikelianos, and had a son, Mark, also known as Brastias. She subsequently became Frances Waldman and the mother of poet Anne Waldman. An identified family photograph from 1945 shows Frances with Anne and Mark at Manumit School. The image preserves a particular family grouping and date; it does not establish every step of the marriage chronology. [4,5]

Naropa’s account of Anne’s background describes Frances spending a decade in the Greek community associated with Angelos’s Delphic ideal and later living in Greenwich Village. That route connects an attempt to revive ancient theater with the American environments in which subsequent experimental writing developed. It is evidence of participation and residence, not a reason to attribute every later family member’s artistic decisions to an inherited program.

At the New School, Frances studied alongside writers including Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, Peter Schjeldahl, and Michael Brownstein. Her reports to Anne preserve a view of the workshop from within. The resulting collection was edited by Lisa Birman, with an introduction by Berkson and an afterword by Anne. Those contributions make the published book a collaboration across generations, while the letters remain Frances’s writing.

The Poetry Project lists Frances among its newsletter editors for 1977–1978. That role adds editorial responsibility to the record of workshop participation and translation. She helped sustain a publication through which the institution addressed its readers and announced its activities.

A launch at the Poetry Project in February 2016 brought that writing before a later audience. The recognition came through an edited correspondence collection rather than a conventional retrospective volume of poems. This matters to the archive: significant literary work can survive in letters, workshop records, and family papers, even when a complete lifetime bibliography has not yet been assembled. The recovery of such work requires retaining its author as an individual subject. [1,2]

Her connection to Natalie Clifford Barney is indirect through Eva Palmer, Glafkos’s mother, and their literary and family network. Direct contact with Barney remains unverified. Within the Constellation, Frances illuminates the work of translation, the circulation of theater, and the value of a woman’s sustained attention to other writers and to her own practice. She belongs in the archive as a poet and translator in her own right, alongside the family relationships that helped preserve parts of her record. [3,4]