Dates

• Existence: 1924 - 1993

Biography

Patricia (Parker) Filipowska was born September 6, 1924 in Burlington, Iowa, the only child of Helen and Guerdon ("Spike") Parker. After graduating in 1942 from Burlington High School with honors in art and poetry, Parker studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and writing and poetry at the University of Chicago. She subsequently enrolled at the Institute of Design in Chicago where she studied visual design and architecture. Many of her drawings and graphics are in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society.

While at the Institute of Design, Parker met fellow student Richard ("Filip") Filipowski whom she married in 1946. In 1950 Richard Filipowski was invited by Walter Gropius to organize and teach the course "Designing Fundamentals" in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. They moved to Cambridge, and subsequently to Lexington, Massachusetts, where they raised their three sons, Stefan, Matthew, and David.

By the mid-1970s, Filipowska had turned her attention more fully to poetry and in 1981 she enrolled in the Poetry Seminars conducted by Kinereth Gensler at Radcliffe College. For her pen name she chose neither her maiden name nor her husband's name but the Slavic feminine form of her husband's name, Filipowska. Almost all of the poetry that she wrote over the next twelve years was the result of her involvement in these seminars. By 1993 she had written over one hundred and eighty poems and her working drafts reveal the immense effort she put into their revision. At her death she left behind a manuscript of one hundred poems entitled, Original Draft Of Anthology Of Poems, culled from her collection. The poems themselves were fully realized; some had already been published. But she had not yet made the choice of how best to put them together to make unified wholes. Her husband engaged Kinereth Gensler, her seminar professor, to do the required arranging and editing. The result was an anthology of sixty-two poems selected from her original manuscript and published posthumously in 1993 under the title The Well . The work is in four sections. Two of them deal with her relationship to Iowa, while the others concern the disparate aspects of her life as a woman and her personal losses. According to Gensler, her professor, editor, and friend, "A primary force underlying Patricia Filipowska's poems is her enduring relationship with Iowa. She was deeply committed to poetry and to her work as a poet. She observed the world with cool curiosity and a passionate heart." Patricia Filipowska died of cancer on March 15, 1993.

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