old literary correspondence

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I sometimes wonder if writers in our post-WWII generation– old codgers that we now are– will be the last to produce volumes of collected letters. Throughout the library here in our home, as in any standard literary library, there are dozens of volumes of letters — not just biographies or collected works containing letters — but complete [...]

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. 7c. Ruins on the Somme: a lost war poet rediscovered

Of the many thousands of times that I have drawn a dusty nondescript book from a poorly-lit shelf in a used-bookstore during the past forty years, only once can I claim to have pulled down and opened an entirely unknown classic of American literature.  Not that I recognized it as such at the time.  Nor even now, on the eve of its re-publication by [...]

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11. The river ran red: poetry wars

early skirmishes at Rockford College Almost from the beginning, poetry for me was a matter of contention.  The fight began before I had shown a poem to anyone.  I had read poetry seriously for several years in solitude, then thought to give my reading some structure and weight with a year or two of formal [...]

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