Yaghjian and Johnson

Yesterday Janne and I went to the Edward Yaghjian retrospective exhibit at The State Museum. It includes over 100 of his paintings and drawings over his career from the 1930's in New York to the 50's-80's in Columbia. He was born in Armenia in 1905, but moved to the U.S. at an early age. After painting with the "Ash Can School" in New York under the guidance of John Sloan and others, he moved to Columbia to become chair of the art department, a position he held until retirement. He died in 1997. His early work realistically depicts life in New York, often panoramic scenes of buildings and harbors. His later work took on brighter, almost Fauve-like colors and became rather stylized, almost primitive in nature. He maintained his emphasis on architecture and cityscapes, often ramshackle.

Columbia scenes by Yaghjian

Interestingly, paintings of the the South Carolina painter William Johnson, born in 1901 in Florence, only a few years earlier than Yaghjian, also show a marked shift from realism to primitivism, as seen in the early self portrait above in contrast to the bright painting next to it, "Blind Singer." Johnson, like Yaghjian, worked for a while in New York. In 1926 he moved to Paris and was influenced by Gaugin, Soutine, and the Expressionists. He married a Danish woman and lived several years in Scandinavia. He achieved only spotty critical success during his life. He became mentally ill and spent most of his last two decades in mental institutions, dying in 1970.

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Robert Pinsky on Difficult Poetry

Ralph Ellison

Recent American Scholar essay on Ralph Ellison by Phyllis Rose

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Ellison Bio

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Ellison's Works/Articles About Him

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Barbara Foley on Ellison's Relationship to the Left

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Irving Howe's 1952 Review of Invisible Man

Janisse Ray

Jannisse Ray Speaking at FMU

Janisse Ray's visit to FMU was a hit with students and faculty alike. She spoke twice on March 28, afternoon and evening. Many classes have been reading her Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Her visit was jointly sponsored by the Biology and English faculties. She arrived late the night before. Early in the morning she met several biologists for a field trip to a local longleaf pine forest. Her passion is the salvation of our environment in general and the revival of the longleaf forests in particular. Both the afternoon session (when she focused on the memoir) and evening session (when she talked more generally and passionately about writing and the environment) were well-attended. In between, for dinner, the biologists organized a Thai meal at The Brass Lantern. Later on, a reception at The Cottage, which I missed because of my trip back to Columbia. Ray was personable, engaging, and especially good with students. Her radical ecological message might have been a bit much for some to swallow, but so be it. She doesn't hold back. She is a masterful reader of her own work--often seeming to have passages memorized.

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Origin of "publish or perish" and other university catch phrases
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100 Best Novels and Nonfiction Books in English since 1900
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Guardian Unlimited 100 Top Works of Fiction/Drama Ever

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Technorati State of the Blogosphere

Bellows

Drawing by Nathaniel Bellows

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Nathaniel Bellows Website: Art and Writing

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Bellows Interview with Robert Birnbaum

Flashback to Peru

Photos from Peru - May 2005

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In Peru, the earliest solar observatory

Mom

I've just returned from a visit with Mom in my hometown, Auburn, Alabama. She will turn 89 on May 4 and continues to live at 244 Woodfield Dr. in the house where I grew up. Born Vera Louise Harrison near Wilkes-Barre, PA, she had an older brother and sister. Her mother died when Mom was 13; Granddad, a school math teacher, told the children, "We'll be fine if none of you gets sick." And they never got sick. They lived in a duplex on Gates Street, a house built by my great grandfather, who was a contractor from Askum. They rented out half of the house to pay the mortgage. After Aunt Lois died a few years ago, Mom took us on a tour of her old haunts, including the house where she was born. The lady living there now allowed us to come inside for a look around.

Mom played the violin as a teenager. I had the bow restrung many years ago, but Mom never played it. She graduated from Mansfield State Teachers' College, where she was president of the women students. She studied home economics and became a high school home ec teacher in Dushore. She met Dad one summer when she went to take some grad courses at Iowa State. Dad was working on his Ph.D. in dairy science at the time. They met at a dance, and we still have Dad's diary in which he recorded the event. They were married in 1942, after Dad's graduation and before he took a job at University of Georgia. He wasn't there long before he joined the Navy. At that point Mom returned home to Wilkes-Barre, where I was born in 1945, 10 months before Dad got out of the Navy and came home to hold me for the first time.

After WWII ended, Dad took a job at Penn State for a brief period, maybe only a year. Then they moved to Auburn where they remained. Mom was the second woman to become an elder in the First Presbyerian Church. She taught Sunday School for years. She took a job in Pre-College counseling at the University for several years. Up until recently, she helped organize and sewed dresses for the annual church project to provide new school clothes for impoverished children in the county. She has played bridge at least twice a month for years. Each Christmas she makes coffee breads--something all her friends look forward to. One year she made over 40, but she's cut back to just a few each year. She was always able to tell a good story or joke. She has hardly ever been sick and has literally never been hospitalized for illness or surgery. She doesn't exercise, and she eats what she wants (th0ugh not much these days), yet remains in good health, taking only a small dose of blood pressure medicine daily. Her health and longevity are probably largetly due to her positive attitude, her refusal to worry about things she can't change. She's about the most laid back, unworried person I know. I hope some of that has rubbed off on me.

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Terry Teachout on histories of jazz

Ron Rash

I've seen Ron Rash several times over the past month, first at the James Dickey Conference, then at the South Carolina Book Festival, and then yesterday at his reading at Columbia's Richland County Library. I have been reading and admiring Ron's poems and stories for years, since well before his novel One Foot in Eden drew national attention, well deserved. His subsequent novels, Saints at the River and A World Made Straight have both done well. All three have been read by Dick Estell on Radio Reader, the nationally syndicated NPR show. We adopted One Foot in Eden as a text for composition classes a couple years ago at Francis Marion University, inviting Ron to campus in connection with that. The book was a tremendous hit among the students.

Although I was already familiar with his work, I first met Ron maybe 6 years ago when we both taught for 3 weeks in the South Governor's School for the Arts Summer Program. He taught fiction, while I handled the poetry for the creative writing students. One of the most gifted of those students, Sarah Saylor, enrolled at USC, and I've run into her several times at readings on campus.

At Ron's library reading yesterday, which I attended with Janne, he was his usual relaxed and articulate self, his distinct Appalachian drawl spinning out stories both funny and poignant as he set up readings from two published novels and one forthcoming novel, the be called Serena. The longest piece he read was from the new novel, and it was about a strong woman, Serena, married to a timber baron, who is as adept at timber work as any of the men in their employ. Ron read a section about how she brought an eagle into the mountains and trained it to attack the rattlesnakes that were such a scourge in the woods. In the Q and A following, speaking of research, Ron told how he tracked down one of the few men who still hunts with eagles, corresponding with him and then I suppose visiting him to find out more about this arcane art. He said when you're doing research on a topic, the best thing to do is to find the person who's fanatical about it, who thinks it's the most important thing in the world, and you get your material from that source.

After responding to the inevitable question about his influences, he noted that he keeps a photo of Flannery O'Connor above his writing desk and imagines that every day she tells him, "You ain't there yet, boy." I can't wait to read Ron's new book of stories, Chemistry and Other Stories, due out next month--and then the novel, which won't be out for another year or so.

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Rash at Western Carolina

Ten Poems by Ron Rash

"The Exchange" in Poetry 180

2004 Interview with Rash

2005 Interview with Rash

Another 2005 Interview with Rash

Reviews of The World Made Straight

Tracy K. Smith

Poet Tracy K. Smith's website and the poem "A Hunger So Honed"
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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. as the last great public historian
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William Safire on the word, "sucker"
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Review of "The Unknown Monet"--early drawings at the Royal Academy
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Poet Frank Bidart wins the 2007 Bollingen Prize

Origami

Paper Art in a San Francisco Gallery, April 2005

Origami

scissors cut paper
paper covers rock
rock breaks scissors
origami crane
many folds away
from flatness
flies above the game

in Japan children bring
their hands together
scissors paper stone
V-fingered flat balled
choki paa guu
so fast you want
to see it again

now different one loses
one wins in contrast
the slow folding
of paper to bring
dimension as poets fold
one word on another
at right angles and wrong

scissors paper rock
mother’s jagged sewing
scissors called pinking shears
the paper I cut dulled them
forming little sawteeth
she rocked me
to dull me to sleep

origami makes paper lyrics
a thousand cranes bring
luck and folded words
choki paa guu
the poet knows paper
cuts rock crumbles
and scissors fly

Schlesinger, Monro, Starkey

The New York Times obituary of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reports that he died of a sudden heart attack in a New York restaurant at age 89. He was most famously an advisor to President Kennedy, writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of his "Thousand Days" in office. In 1945, at age 27, he also won a Pulitzer--that one for The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger grew up in Iowa City, where his father was a professor before moving to Harvard. He never got an advanced degree but was a prolific writer, continuing to produce until very recently. He wrote a book adamantly condemning the Iraq war, calling it a "ghastly mistake."

Thinking about Schlesinger reminds me of my Tougaloo College colleague John Monro, who died 5 years ago and was also 89 at his death. John knew Schlesinger at Harvard and often told stories about him and other Harvard luminaries such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Pusey. John's obituary in the Harvard Gazette recounts his decision to leave Harvard and work in historically black colleges in the south.

Speaking of former colleagues (this one alive and well and nowhere near age 89), I just came across David Starkey's blog for The Creative Community TV Show, which he hosts in Santa Barbara. Starkey also edits King Log, an online poetry journal in which several of my poems appeared back in 1998. In a couple weeks, I'll see David in New York at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. David is writing plays these days, including his most recent, How Red the Fire, in which Emily Dickinson is a main character. For old time's sake, here are three poems by David, complete with audio.

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New York Times review of Tom Bissell's book about his father and Vietnam

Origami and Poetry

Origami Goliath Beetle designed and made

by Robert Lang from a 7" square of paper

(as pictured on his web site)

Two articles from The New Yorker's Anniversary Issue (February 19 and 26, 2007) interested me. Susan Orlean, one of my favorite nonfiction writers, contributed "The Origami Lab," a profile of Robert Lang, an accomplished physicist who now devotes his energies to origami. He applies mathematical modeling to new origami designs. He and various other practitioners have revolutionized the art (and science) of paper folding in the past 20 years. Some of the paper insects shown on his web site would seem to be a challenge to construct by any means, much less using the process of folding a small (6- or 7-inch) square of paper without making any cuts. I discovered amazing origami web sites by other artists (such as Joseph Wu).

In the same issue, Dana Goodyear's "The Moneyed Muse" tells what has happened at The Poetry Foundation in Chicago since Indianapolis heiress Ruth Lilly (at left) donated $200 million to it (and the magazine it publishes) in 2002. John Barr, the Wall Street executive and poet who was hired as president of the foundation, is overseeing plans to buy land and build a 25,000 square foot building to house the foundation, the magazine, a lecture hall, and a library. He wants it to be a "national home for poetry." Goodyear writes, "Money is a shocking thing in poetry, and Ruth Lilly's gift was greeted with a measure of ambivalence." That's putting it mildly. While some poets and critics cheered, others sneered and have continued sneering in the wake of some of the foundation's initiatives. I'd like to see at least some of the money dissiminated more widely among various excellent and established but financially struggling magazines. Perhaps the foundation will find a way to do that in the future.

Meanwhile, I'm pondering this juxtaposition of origami and poetry business (po-biz) in The New Yorker. Both arts involve giving a sort of dimension, literal or figurative, to a simple piece of paper. Both require only the simple work of hands to bring about a complex result. Robert Lang's origami pieces convert a 7-inch square of paper to shapes of almost unbelievable complexity. The Lilly bequest endows the ancient process of writing poetry with enormous consequentiality. Few, if any, poets will be enriched by the money. But if the foundation uses the money wisely, poetry itself could be enriched.

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Poetry Foundation's response to Goodyear's New Yorker article, along with a series of related links

John McCain on Campus

State Senator Hugh Leatherman and U.S. Senator John McCain

Senator John McCain with Prof. Alissa Warters

Senator John McCain was on the Francis Marion University campus on February 20, one of his several appearances this month in South Carolina as the 2008 presidential campaign cranks into motion. In the state during the same week were Barak Obama, who drew a huge crowd in Columbia at the Convention Center, and Hilary Clinton, who appeared before a more limited crowd of about 500 in Florence. David White, the political scientist down the hall (who once worked for McCain in Arizona), says the large rallies are unusual for this early in the election cycle. Perhaps the lack of any clear favorites among Dems or Repubs has led the many would-be candidates to charge out of the gate early.

McCain, who was introduced by Dr. Eddie Floyd, S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell, and S.C. Senator Hugh Leatherman (of Florence), spoke for only 10 minutes or so in the Nursing Building Lobby to a crowd of 200-250. Then he took questions, and I was pleased that most of them came from students: "How did you get into politics?" "What would you do about the partisanship that currently paralyzes our government?" "What's the future of Iraq?"

There was an awkward moment when an 87-year-old man from N.C. walked right up to the podium and began holding forth on his own war record. He went on and on and didn't seem to have a question. McCain was very patient, at one point asking him to summarize. Finally, after much too long, there was a break in the man's monologue, McCain thanked him, and the crowd applauded, thus ending the little filibuster. McCain circulated through the crowd shaking hands and signing autographs. I had my Founders Hall neighbor, Alissa Warters (a political scientist), shake the Senator's hand while I took her photo.

I am not a McCain supporter, though I honor the fortitude he showed during his long imprisonment in North Vietnman. I think he is a man with strong and honorable convictions, although I disagree with his stance on Iraq, his commitment to Bush's intransigence.

The Mother

Occasionally I have my poetry students write a "flash poem," a poem drafted quickly on a topic I announce in class on the spur of the moment. Yesterday I took into class my print of James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black" and had them write about it. My own flash poem:

The Mother
is locked in her son's frame. His dark paint
fleshes her out. Her porcelain hands
rest on a black smock's blur. Unblinking,
her gaze fades into the curtains.
She gives off nothing, wrapped in repose.
The bonnet on her severe head
covers a bunched cascade of hair
as muted as her pursed lips.
The geometry of mother and son
extends to infinity, to all the late suppers
and blighted nights. Pungent oils
have hardened on the canvas, brushes
abandoned. The painter has left her
to her own stark desires.

Frost

Adam Kirsch reviews The Notebooks of Robert Frost in The New York Sun.
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Mick Brown reviews In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton.

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More on Frost's notebooks.
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Excerpt from Christopher Benfey's review of the Frost notebooks in The New Republic:

The biggest surprise in The Notebooks of Robert Frost, sixty years of private jottings in preparation for poems and prose, is the spectacular profusion of epigrams, aphorisms, and what Frost called "dark sayings." Frost once wrote, in relation to Emerson, that "I don't like obscurity and obfuscation, but I do like dark sayings I must leave the clearing of to time." He remarks in an early notebook entry that "It is best to be flattered ... when your simile passes for a folk saying from a locality." Certain phrases recur many times in these notebooks, as Frost worries them into final shape: "Great thoughts grave thoughts" or (later used as the title for a poem) "Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." Another saying, repeated at least a dozen times in the course of the notebooks, consists of three stark words, "dark darker darkest"--a sort of ominous refrain for the whole.

Jonathan Kirsch (no relation to Adam) reviews Richard A. Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism.
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Jonathan (no relation to Kirsch) Yardley pans Vikram Chandra's massive Sacred Games, most hyped HarperCollins title of the season.
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Michael S. Hopkins reviews Made to Stick, an explanation by the Heath brothers of why some ideas stick and others don't.

Iowa City

Prairie Lights Books - Iowa City

For the past three days I've been in Iowa City where I had a chance to visit the best university art museum and one of the best bookstores (Prairie Lights) I know of. Temperatures Thursday and early Friday were bone-chilling. Thursday morning the reading was -9 on the bank clock on Dubuque Street. By midday Friday, the weather was more humane. Saturday was a gorgeous clear day--perfect for walking in the town and university. I spent time with Cile and David Goding on the northside on Brown Street, several blocks down from where Kurt Vonnegut used to occupy a rambling house on a hill.

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Iowa City

A cirrus sky

bleeds blue onto

half-plowed morning,

brings a promise

of corn to the prairie.

The river with frozen fringes

stutters north. Forgotten,

it tongues past

sturdy churches, pleads

with scalloped bridges.

An eagle spans a copse

of barren trees.

In Iowa City, I read Rebecca McClanahan's The Riddle Song, a series of essays about her family. Achingly honest, she writes as well as anyone about the complexities and mixed feelings of families. The collection opens with a piece called simply "Aunt." It concludes as follows, referring to her Aunt Bessie:

Now all these years later I hold her to me--a tribal instinct perhaps. Or perhaps I simply want to give back some of the words to the young woman in the diary. I sit in my study where shelves of books line the green walls. I finger the dictionaries and search for what lies beneath: aunt. From old French, ante, an offshoot, hall leading toward the main room. Latin root, amma: mother. Or amare: to love. As in amigo, as in amour. As in amateur, one who works for the bare love of it.

Rebecca McClanahan will visit our campus on Thursday for meetings with students and an evening reading. I look forward to seeing her again so that I can tell her how much I admire her poetry and nonfiction.

Tony Huggins

Tony Huggins in Party Mode - circa 1990

Tony Huggins in His Office - circa 2004

Tony Huggins retired from the Francis Marion University English Department last spring after spending most of his career there. We're still feeling the aftershocks of his sudden death by heart attack on January 9 while with his wife Marion on the beach near their Pawleys Island house. This was all the more stunning given Tony's fitness, his regular cycling, walking, and running. I put out a request to our department and various people formerly at FMU for written memoirs about Tony. 20 people responded, and with the help of Beckie Flannagan, I put them together in a bound album for Marion. Here's the piece I wrote about Tony:

I knew Tony before I knew anyone else at Francis Marion College. We both took Carolyn Matalene’s Composition Theory class at USC in 1983 and often went to the Humanities Building café for coffee afterwards. I had just enrolled in a Ph.D. program, while Tony was commuting from Darlington twice a week, taking courses toward his own degree. Right off, I admired Tony’s intelligence coupled with his finely-tuned bullshit detector. If he thought a reading assignment was off-base--or didn’t square with his teaching experience-- he said so and didn’t mind explaining why.

We became friends partly because we were the oldest students in the class but also because we were both graduates of Davidson College and had that background in common. I discovered that he had maintained a close friendship with Douglas Houchens, one of my Davidson art professors. Although our years at Davidson didn’t quite overlap, we shared numerous memories and acquaintances. From the outset, Tony was evasive about his post-undergrad activities in the sixties when he was involved in military intelligence, but he told me all about his weekend at Woodstock in 1969.

Arriving at Francis Marion for a job interview in 1989, I was eager to talk with Tony. In those days, job candidates were subjected to a gauntlet of small-group interviews in faculty offices, along with meetings with the Department Chair, the President, and the Vice President for Academic Affairs (now the Provost). For my interview in Tony’s office, I stood up the whole time; there was no room to sit down. Nath Dresser was there, and the three of us had a good conversation about music. I decided Francis Marion was a place I could settle into.

Tony always loved talking about music, art, film, and literature. He had little patience for anything that distracted him from those fundamental interests. Even when our paths crossed in the gym locker room, we wound up talking about Raging Bull or Mystic River, Atonement or The Lovely Bones.

Tony’s well-formed opinions about teaching, and his skepticism about composition assessment—in fact, his skepticism about many classroom practices—were often maddening. He had the audacity to ask why we were collecting data in this way or that, to ask how we knew our test results were valid. He would ask why this book was preferable to that one, why it was important to collect student portfolios. Tony was a gadfly, and his querulous manner drove me crazy, especially when I chaired the Freshman Writing Committee. But underlying this attitude was a desire for rigor, an aversion to wasted effort, and a commitment to serving our students well.

Tony’s real value to the Department came out during interviews with job candidates. When the rest of us were tossing softballs to our prospective colleagues, Tony would wind up and throw a nasty curve that just nicked the outside corner of the plate. The interviewee would invariably look startled as if to say, “Where did that come from?” The good ones could handle it. Those who struck out wound up looking for work elsewhere.

Tony once did us the great favor of asking a modern drama candidate to name her favorite Arthur Miller play (not exactly a curve ball). When she paused for agonizing seconds and responded, “The Iceman Cometh,” it was game over for her, and we went on to hire Jon Tuttle, who was fortunately able to name a play that had actually been penned by Miller.

For years, Tony had an inflated green plastic dinosaur hanging from his office ceiling. By the time he retired, it was faded but showed no sign of deflating. I asked Tony if I could have it to hang in the Faculty Lounge, and he gladly donated it. It hangs there now.

In some ways Tony was a dinosaur—a bit larger than life, holding the line on old traditions and standards, skeptical of new fangled technology and teaching, wedded to the old liberal arts values that he and I soaked up at Davidson College. But mostly, Tony’s ideas were new, different, unpredictable, probing, challenging. These are the characteristics that drew our best students to his classes and kept them seated for hours on the pastel blue chair in his office, talking with him beneath the dinosaur, surrounded by the books that Tony loved.

Please Don't Feed the Poets

Jim Harrison in The New York Times - "Please Don't Feed the Poets"
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Middlebury College History Department bans Wikipedia as a source.

7 Wonders

Janne at Machu Picchu - May 2005

Stonehenge - August 2001

Of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one (the pyramids of Egypt) still exists. The original list dates from the the 2nd century B.C. Now, voting for the New Seven Wonders of the World is underway. 21 sites have been nominated. The results will be announced in Lisbon, Portugal on July 7 (070707). I've seen 6 of the 21, and perhaps not surprisingly, 4 of those are among my 7 choices. My votes go to Angkor Temple in Cambodia, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, Kiyomizu Temple in Japan, Machu Picchu in Peru, Stonehenge in England, and Timbuktu in Mali.

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How Baghdad has Changed--from NY Times Week in Review

Robinson, Mozart, and Others

Scott Donaldson essay on Edward Arlington Robinson in New Letters
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Review of Hurricane Blues (poems about Katrina and Rita) by Ellen Steinbaum in The Boston Globe
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"The Triumph of Mozart" an essay by by Jon Pott in Books and Culture: A Christian Review in the year of the 250th anniversay of Mozart's birth
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New York Times obituary for Ryszard Kapuscinski, author of The Emperor
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The drawing and selecting of New Yorker cartoons--from The Washington Post
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National Book Critics' Circle Award Nominees

The James Dickey Conference

James Dickey's son Christopher, author of With the Contras and Summer of Deliverance, now Newsweek Paris Bureau Chief

Pat Conroy

I attended most sessions of The James Dickey Conference at the University of South Carolina last Friday and Saturday. Oddly, the venue was the 8th floor of the Business School. The panels featured scholarly papers on Dickey's work as well as personal reminiscences. Attendance was respectable but not quite as heavy as I expected. A number of the presenters, such as Lorrie Goldensohn from Vassar College and Edward Larrissy from the University of Leeds in the UK (both on my Saturday afternoon panel) had their expenses paid. I expected to see far more students, especially grad students, in attendance. Perhaps the conference fee was a deterrent, but you'd think the English Department would wave costs for students. The only undergrad I saw there was my friend Akane, who showed up particularly for my session, which pleased me.

I particularly liked the session featuring writers John Lane, James Applewhite, and Ron Rash, as well as the fascinating panel discussion by Dickey's sons Chris and Kevin, his daughter Bronwen (now in grad school at Columbia University), and his second wife Deborah. They acknowledged his drinking and carousing but all praised his parenting, agreeing that despite his work, he never turned them away. He could be stern but never violent. He often devised inventive, unorthodox games and elaborate fantasies with them. He taught them all to shoot a bow and arrow. Chris and Kevin, who were growing up just as Dickey's star was rising and he was traveling extensively, commented on the poet's contacts with celebrities, such as the time Robert Redford came to visit their Lake Katherine home to discuss movie projects--or the time Bob Dylan called in the middle of the night to discuss creativity.

Pat Conroy, who actually attended some of the other sessions, delivered a funny and poignant closing talk to a packed auditorium. He gave a hilarious account of his own trip down the Chattooga River with a friend, emulating the guys in Deliverance. He spoke for a good 40 minutes from a text hand-penned on yellow legal sheets. He recalled his fascination with Dickey's work when he was in his early twenties, working on the book that would become The Water is Wide. He eventually commuted two days a week to USC to audit a poetry course with Dickey. Conroy admits to being a lousy poet but claims to have learned much from the man he reveres as his best teacher. As much as he admired Dickey, he said, "I got to see James Dickey fall in love with being James Dickey. This taught me something. He was heading straight for 'sock-em dog' [an infamous stretch of rapids on the Chattooga, which had done in Conroy on his outing]." Conroy went on, "It was deleterious to have moon-eyed groupies such as me follow him like turtles around campus."

Conroy, in a characteristic bit of hyperbole, claimed that Poems: 1957-1967 is "the best book of poetry published by an American." Dickey "strung language up to his bow and aimed it at the carotid artery of poetry itself."

About his first book, The Boo, Conroy said that the Citadel officer who was the book's title character was (unlike his father) "a hard man who was also a soft man." And "Dickey was that way too."

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Joe Queenan writing about astonishing books