US woman, 101, releases her first collection of poems

Sarah Yerkes was in her 90s when a friend invited her to try something new. A graduate of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Yerkes had had decades-long careers: first as a landscape architect using brick and stone; then as a sculptor creating abstract works in wood and steel, and in her later years, papier-mache.

But as she aged, sculpting had become physically challenging. A fellow resident at Ingleside at Rock Creek, the DC retirement community where she lives, had started taking a poetry writing class, so Yerkes joined, too, The Washington Post reports.

Last month, at age 101, she released her first collection of poems, “Days of Blue and Flame,” published by Passager Books at the University of Baltimore. The book is the latest iteration of a creative mind that has worked with form and style for the better part of a century.

“I really feel like the good fairies were standing over my cradle, giving me the oomph to create,” Yerkes said recently while eating a breakfast of cornflakes and toast in her apartment.

A 74-year resident of Washington, Yerkes was raised in Cleveland and educated as an architect. She fell into landscape design accidentally when she and a friend entered a contest and won. They ended up opening a business together.

Sculpting came to her decades later, after she was in her 50s and newly married to her second husband, architect David Yerkes.

“I was living in the Watergate and I didn’t have much to do and I thought, ‘Oh my, what’s going to happen to me?’ ” She heard about a sculpture class starting up nearby. “So I went pottering down to the Corcoran. I just loved it. So I kept on going down to the Corcoran twice a week and I got to the point where I wanted to start showing.”

She worked as a sculptor into her early 80s, when she and her husband moved to Ingleside. There was less room to work, and her stamina began to flag. “I started to make small pieces but then I sort of ran out of steam, and it was harder to work and I just didn’t think it was very important anymore,” she said.

At Ingleside, she became friends with Henry Morgenthau III, a retired television producer whose father had been treasury secretary under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The two had never met, but they were the same age, had traveled in similar circles and got along well.

Morgenthau had been attending the monthly poetry workshop and encouraged Yerkes to join him. Last year, upon turning 100, he published his first book of poems, which knits together key moments in U.S. history, such as the death of Roosevelt, with intimate, sometimes painful reflections on coming of age at a time when being Jewish, or questioning one’s sexuality, were subjects often left unexplored.

For Yerkes, the unexplored lay in feelings she learned to repress growing up in, as she put it, “a waspy society.” But her upbringing also instilled diligence. The workshop’s teacher, Bonnie Naradzay, would offer prompts, such as writing on a certain theme, or in the style of a particular poet, and she was struck by the way Yerkes would take a prompt and run with it, even as she protested that she “did not really write poetry.”

“I loved the fact that she is a sculptor,” Naradzay said. “I realized what a lively and intuitive mind she has — or should I say, imaginative. She said it was kind of like doing a sculpture.”

Passager Books, which also published Morgenthau’s book, focuses on older writers. But age hasn’t limited Yerkes, said Kendra Kopelke, the press’s co-editor. “When you are older, you have to adapt to a smaller universe, but you bring to that all the tools you have learned throughout your life and apply them in new and interesting ways,” she said. “At a time we normally think of as winding down, Sarah’s imagination is unfolding.”

Yerkes’s life history reminded Naradzay of another sculptor-poet connection: that of Auguste Rodin and Rainer Maria Rilke, who worked as Rodin’s secretary for a time. “Rodin told Rilke, ‘You don’t sit and wait for inspiration; you sit down and get to work — you do it as if you’re doing a regular job,’ ” Naradzay said.