“Sure gonna miss ya when you go!” (B. Dylan)

Best wishes,

Colin

We’ve come to where eternity
begins, its gateway arched.
Another drop flows out to sea
and leaves the land more parched.

-o-

This is the sense, the instinctive thing, I got from the first post of yours I read. It is why I’ve been inclined to follow your posts. Your comment strikes the same note as does something Whitman said about how large is poetry’s house and with room for all. The kind of poetry comprehension you express is, well, it is just rare.

Man, I wish you had gotten around to that Beltane post!

Terreson

One poet I met who was very quiet was Cid Corman, a guest one year of the IWP; I think he was there because he translated Japanese poetry (though I don’t think he knew any Japanese); he was a crusty old guy who seemed far older than his years, no personality to speak of, very aloof, didn’t party with anyone. Maybe he was going through a mid-life crisis, I don’t know… To me, he represented perfectly the rather dull little poems of his School.

But Paul Engle, oh, he was quite the opposite. Paul filled up a room, or a literary party at a Iowa City bank… I agree with you that Paul’s poems don’t really reflect that kind of personality…

“I wonder if Engel was the way I imagine him—-kind, quiet?”

Well, no, he actually had a loud, glad-handing, back-slapping, mover-and-shaker type of personality. I remember him saying to me once with great emphasis, “William Butler Yeats said, ‘if poetry doesn’t sing, it doesn’t talk!’”

When I told him I had been to a Donald Justice reading, he seemed disappointed and said “I hate to say this, but Don reads rather like a frog!”

Paul had tremendous energy, and made the International Writing Program at Iowa a well-funded, thrill-a-minute, literary fete. The IWP was a far more exciting a place to be than his old Poetry Workshop, and knowing Paul, this was partially an act of revenge.

Had I known as much then as I know now, I would have picked his brain on Tate, Ransom and the Fugitives (one of their circle picked Paul for his Yale Younger) and his teacher, Edmund Blunden, at Oxford, when Paul was a Rhodes Scholar (Blunden knew Robert Graves, etc), but I’m glad I knew him in the little way I did.

Thomas

I’ll look forward to seeing you again on Harriet, and good luck with your research. I hope to see it in published form someday.

good to see you hear, Noah.

I second what Desmond and Christopher said so eloquently.

You made Harriet a happy, democratic, profound place for me.

You were always kind, even when I acted like a brat (which is most of the time).

It was great to briefly meet your mother, and I LOVED her poem.

Reading about your father was very moving. I liked the anecdote of him copying a Paul Engle book for you, when you moved near Iowa City. I worked for Paul when I was in Iowa City. The poetry world is small and it’s nice to discover these little connections. You mention your father taking you to Horace Gregory’s house, a figure who popped up in my recent research on Millay and the Modernists.

One more connection: reading last night a book I purchased some time ago called ‘The Ghost of Tradition’ by Kevin Walzer, and seeing you in there, and the poem you wrote to Andrew Marvell…

I hope you continue to make Harriet a home…

Thomas