At what was to be her last party, in a grove along the Patuxent River, Elisavietta Ritchie read poetry to friends and family who had come to say goodbye.
The date was July 30, 2022, but it was not the last. Friends gathered again in 2023 an 2034 for the ailing Ritchie, an acclaimed poet and prominent woman of the world. Elsavietta died on January 13, 2025, in Solomons, at 92. The 2025 gathering, on June 28, the eve on her 93rd birthday, at her riverside getaway at Jack Bay, will be a memorial.
Elisavietta Artomonoff Ritchie Farnsworth published more than 20 poetry volumes, among them Issues of Immortality, published by New Bay Books, in 2021. On her bio page of that title she describes herself as ”a multi-tasking writer, poet, editor, photographer, mentor, workshop leader and poet-in-the-schools” specialist.
Her work appeared in literary journals as well as in the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere. She was married to Clyde Farnsworth, a retired New York Times international reporter and author,. On occasion Ritchie took photographs abroad for his stories.
Ritchie was born in Kansas City, Mo. on June 29, 1932. She was educated at the
Sorbonne in Paris, Cornell University, University of California at .Berkeley, Georgetown . University, and American University in Washington. She lived around the world, and in later years in Washington and Southern Maryland.
Colleagues speak of her productivity. and incessant drive to write and revise. New Bay Books publisher Sandra Olivetti Martin, formerly the editor and publisher at Bay Weekly newspaper, recalled how Ritchie would phone or email to say she she'd written about a topic covered in the paper. Above, Ritchie is pictured at her home along the Patuxent River amid copies of Bay Weekly.
“Every time we published a story on anything, she’d send me a poem she’d written about the same subject. Frogs, for instance," Martin said. "She was a faucet."
Her flow had scarcely ebbed she she hit 80, an occasion noted in an Issues of Immortality entry titled, By 80, Poets Are Supposed to Croak. It begins—
Still words glitter forth like aging
Whores on back streets of our lives,
Perform whatever tricks we ask
For money or for free.
Another poem titled Issues of Immortality suggests that even now, Ritchie is trying to reach us with more of her verse. We await the next delivery. The poem begins—
If poets are indeed immortal
We will live forever in our pyramids
Beyond the River Styx.
Yet how to smuggle out
Our latest manuscripts?
Entrance blocks too big to budge.
Those sleek tomb cats as couriers?
Unreliable, distractible, they ate
Our carrier pigeons. Still,
They chase the mice.
W.e await the next delivery.
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