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William Michael Cavanagh died on Saturday, August 26, at the age of 74. Mike grew up in Mill Valley, California, near San Francisco. He later lived in New York City, in Manhattan, Kansas, and in Minneapolis, where he studied at the University of Minnesota as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and received a PhD. He came to teach at Grinnell College in 1971.
Mike is survived by his wife, Lenore Marie "Lynn" Cavanagh, also a Californian, whom he met one lucky day in San Francisco in 1965 and married in 1966. Mike is also survived by his sister, Patty Dobbs, of Newton, Iowa; by a son, Sean, his wife, Diana, and their children Daniel and Isabel, of Silver Spring, Maryland; and by his son, Peter, his wife, Erin, and their two children, Kate and Will, of Wellman, Iowa.
Mike taught English at Grinnell College from 1971 to 2005. He taught the works of Milton, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bishop, W.B. Yeats, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden and many more. He loved introducing students to poetry. Thinking that Grinnell needed a poetry writing course, he invented one in the 1970s and taught it until the mid-1990s. He was also the first professor to teach Joyce's Ulysses, long regarded as too difficult for undergraduates. In addition, Mike now taught in the now-fabled eight-credit humanities courses with Don Smith, Morris Parslow, Beryl Clotfelter, and Catherine Frazier.
On sabbatical in 1978, Mike was the Daniel Koshland Professor of Humanities at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In 1985 and 1991, Mike taught on the Grinnell-in-London program. In London he taught courses about the literature of the two world wars and courses in literature and landscape. He taught Ulysses twice in Dublin, making his students walk almost every inch of the Dublin that Joyce recorded and evoked in his novel. And he made sure they read every page. In the summers of 1997 and 2000 he taught American and Irish poetry at Nanjing University in China. In 2003 he was named the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature.
Mike's dissertation for his PhD was about Archibald MacLeish's poem Conquistador as an allegory of Roosevelt's New Deal. He later published articles on MacLeish, Seamus Heaney, Dante, Milton, John Crowe Ransom and W.B. Yeats. In 2009, he published a book at Seamus Heaney, Professing Poetry. The scholar Rand Brandes said it was "a book many of us have been waiting for, a book on Heaney's prose that will enable the next generation of Heaney students and scholars to discover new constellations of Heaney's universe." Mike finished a book on Milton in 2016.
In addition to scholarship, Mike devoted the last decades of his career to writing and publishing poetry. He had poems published in journals that included The Sewanee Review, The South Carolina Review, the Free State Review, Aurorean, Rattle, Eclipse, the Heartland Review, The South Dakota Review, Lyrical Iowa, among others. He spent almost two decades teaching himself Dante's Commedia in Italian. Much of his poetry strives after Dante's simple style and manner. Mike considered his grandchildren his greatest poems.
Mike was active for the Poweshiek County Democrats. He helped teach reading to 1st graders at Bailey Park elementary school and was a volunteer for Kids Against Hunger. He was a friend of the Drake Library. For many years he managed the Grinnell College Public Events Committee. He brought many renowned performers to Grinnell and he had a ball entertaining them.
A Service to Commemorate the Life of Mike Cavanagh will be held on Wednesday, August 30 at 11:00 a.m. in Herrick Chapel on the Grinnell College Campus.
In lieu of flowers or gifts, the family requests that memorials be sent to the Drake Community Library in Grinnell.
Courtesy of Smith Funeral Homes and Cremation Service http://tinyurl.com/y887jys8
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Barbara Garris (Edwards)
OMG. Mrs Robinson from 7th grade would be so proud of Mike. We had to read so many books and so many book reports. We even did poetry. Mike was a really fun kid. Always ready for fun. I went to school with him forever. I so enjoyed catching up with him on this website before the reunion.
What a wonderful life he had. He was so proud of his family and loved his wife so much, I know how very sad this is for them.
God Bless You, you will be so very missed.
Barbara Garris Edwards
Larry Selna
God bless him and his family!
I have great memories playing freshmen football with him. I remember the both of us hitch-hiking back home to Mill Valley after practices.
Thomas Basile
How could one ever forget Mike!
I never had some much fun practicing football as it was with Mike!
No matter what Coach Buckley had us do in our drills Mike was
having a great time and never took it seriously.A real joy to
be aroiund!!
Tom Basile
Spencer Merryman
So sorry to hear about Mike! I never knew much about him after high school but it seems that he was quite an intellectual and had a wonderful life and family. I remember that he was always very friendly and good to be around back then. Its just too bad that we all have to go our separate ways when we had so many good friends in high school.
Joe Behm
Mike and I grew up in Mill Valley, living just two blocks apart. We attended Park School and Alto School together.
Our high school years began when we took the MC entrance exam. We were driven to MC that day by Mike’s mother, given bus money to get home. Instead, we bought burgers and shakes and walked home along the railroad tracks through the Corte Madera tunnel. We arrived on the Mill Valley side ahead of a freight train by a scant ten minutes. Life on the rails can be tough.
While we formed a life-long bond, our lives could not have been more dissimilar. Mike came from a small family – one sister, whereas I had six sisters and one brother. We both had a complete set of parents. Growing up, Mike played Little League baseball; I raised and raced Homing pigeons. But we remained good friends. While at MC, he played football and got his nose busted by Charlie Augustine; I ran track and did a lot of jumping around during my last two years.
Our paths diverged abruptly at the end of our sophomore year for reasons that even as adults, neither of us could quite fathom. Mike left MC and ended up graduating as a public school boy from Tam High – probably the best thing that could have happened to him.
Mike married an MC girl, became a college professor; had two boys and four grandchildren. I married an MC girl, went to work in the financial services industry, then the advertising business; had two boys and two grandchildren.
Years passed and whenever we did connect, humor was our stock in trade. Within 30-seconds, we were making each other laugh uproariously. But as often happens in life, our connections grew further apart, until we lost touch – almost.
I often thought about Mike over those years and sometimes yearned for the simpler days when everything made us laugh. It was Betsy’s husband, Steve Bryant, another public school boy from Tam, who gave me a lead as to how to track down Mike. “All I know is that he’s a teacher at some small college in Gridley or Grimly something, in Iowa.” Ma Bell did the rest. I found him at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Once we reconnected we met every summer during his annual visits to Marin always spending the day walking around Phoenix Lake – well, in recent years we’d saunter up to the top of the dam, stand around for a while admiring the landscape, then turn around, head back down the path, settling for the BBQ tables next to the parking lot.
Frequent phone calls and emails filled the gaps between visits. I treasured those visits for they brought back a time before our careers and families engulfed our lives—as they must.
The last time I saw Mike was on July 6, 2017. I had a copy of his book, “Professing Poetry – Seamus Heaney’s Poetics” with me in the car and asked him to autograph it.
To Joe,
Who will always be a friend,
in this world, and beyond.
MC