October 27, 2018

Waiting for the people who wanted to use my office down by the river, I opened old notebooks– 1969-1971– and read the poems I’d written then. They were, by and large, terrible. I wondered why I went so long without much improvement. Then I realized that I wasn’t interested in working on craft. I’d hit upon a workable tone of wonder, and with it I wanted to celebrate and memorialize all that happened in my life. I took the concept of Bard seriously, and a bard, I thought, opens his mouth and sings praises. The sort of exultant, semi-biblical vein I mined almost from the first was perfect for that. When did I decide I wanted to write poems which were actually good on their own, without reference to the elevation of their subject matter? My guests arrived before I read that far, but the image that comes into my mind now is me sitting in my upstairs apartment in Baltimore, reading a rejection slip–from I forget whom–that finally told me what I was doing wrong. I’d been such a prodigy all through high school and college that no one ventured to correct me. I think now with wonder on the patience of Hale Chatfield and others who praised and encouraged what they much surely have recognized as, at best, overreaching,

Gary Dodd is dead. He was my hero when we lived at his family’s house when my mother was ill.