Years ago, when my former husband had just been hired at the University of Delaware, the then-Department Chair offered to fly me from Arkansas to Delaware to look for a house for our family. (Can you imagine that now?) The night I arrived, there was a guest poet reading. I was invited. The poet was the late, great, silver-haired Seamus Heaney. I’d read a few of his poems, but basically I didn’t know squat. At the reception—which was quite intimate, at someone’s house—we were brushing shoulders, picking up cheese and crackers. I could have said anything, asked him anything. But I couldn’t think what to say.
During our first year at the University of Delaware, Sir Angus Wilson was a guest faculty member. I was teaching part-time there and was a grad student at the University of Arkansas, studying long-distance for my exams. I could have taken Angus’s course, but I didn’t. I think I was afraid of making a fool of myself.
The great poet James Wright (below) spent a semester at Delaware the year before he died. We took a long walk in the woods together with his wife Annie and some friends. I remember his singing the French Chef’s song from Sesame Street to our son. At least we could talk of burls on trees, fall leaves on the stream, and Sesame Street. 
While I was at Delaware, we hosted—you may recognize some or most of these names—Rita Dove, Charles Simic, Stephen Dunn, Dabney Stuart, Michael S. Harper, Camille Paglia, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley (below), Susan Sontag, Ann Beattie, William Gaddis, Christopher Hitchens, Nicholas Kristof, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, Charles Johnson, I could go on and on. And of course we had Gibbons Ruark, Jeanne Murray Walker, and W. D. Snodgrass, (et moi), on the faculty. I became friends with some, others not.
I wonder now, what CAN we get from other writers, particularly those who leave us awestruck? What can we get, period, from each others' presence in such situations?
Back then, I thought it was a game of who knows stuff and who doesn’t. But no. I'm certain now that it isn’t the exchange of information that matters, it’s the presence of one whose life has been utterly given over to, to, to something—to expression, to art, to seeing, to knowing, I don’t know what to call it, but I know it when I see it, the face of complete abandonment, not just abandonment, but abandonment TO something. To something worth everything.
A comment from another great, Jim Harrison: “Though I don’t teach I often get sought for advice from young poets. I say I don’t have time for you unless you’re going to give your life to it. That’s what it takes.”
It seems that we “absorb” from others more than we “exchange.” I may not have missed out on anything when I was struck silent. All the great and modestly-great people I’ve been in the presence of, something has passed between us that’s changed me. And maybe them.
Of course the same thing can be said of books. There’s an actual exchange. We absorb each other. We change each other. Which makes it matter, I think, WHAT we read. Which makes it matter HOW we read, what we’re after when we read.
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A note: No Need of Sympathy has been nominated for the William Carlos Williams Award, the UNT Rilke Prize, as well as the Kingsley Tufts Award. Any one of those would make me pretty happy.
A lot of people have written about what we’ve lost and gained in the great changeover. Interesting, but useless, finally, since change is already the fact.What I’m committing to here feels no different in intent from, say, what the far-more-hermetic Jim Harrison does, and has done, in his Montana and Patagonia hideouts, furiously writing novels and poems: they come so steadily that the mind almost has to drop into a deeper awareness. Speaking of Harrison, I’ll be at Interlochen Public Radio station this afternoon to record—as I do monthly—my review of a recent poetry book. This month is Harrison’s new book, Songs of Unreason, just out from Copper Canyon Press. Here’s a little of my review, plus a poem of Harrison’s:I’d say nothing has changed in the new book except that the light of awareness that’s infused all of Harrison’s work is brighter, here. I mean that the poems—as the title implies---are “Songs of Unreason”—they’re singing more than they’re telling stories, and they have taken an even more deliberate step off the cliff of reason. That doesn’t for a second mean that he’s not holding us in mind as readers. He’s too authentic to play with language that leaves us behind. “The world is too grand to reshape with babble,” he says in one poem. I’ll give you a poem to show you what I mean by the singing, by the step off the cliff. Here’s the first poem in the book:BroomTo remember you’re alivevisit the cemetery of your fatherat noon after you’ve made loveand are still wrapped in a mammalianodor that you are forced to cherish.Under each stone is someone’s inevitablesurprise, the unexpected deathof their biology that struggled hard, as it must.Now to home without looking back,enough is enough.En route buy the best wineyou can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.Have a few swallows then throw the furnitureout the window and begin sweeping.Sweep until the walls arebare of paint and at your feet sweepuntil the floor disappears. Finish the winein this field of air, and return to the cemeteryin evening and wind through the stonesa slow dance of your name visible only to birds.Okay, that’s the blank slate, or swept-out space, that he starts with. The long sequence that immediately follows is called “Suite of Unreason.” which is printed in a different type-face on the unnumbered verso of the pages and goes on for the rest of the book, except for the final poem. So you have named poems on the octavo pages and these short little poems on the verso, little bits of unreason breaking in on the other. But I don’t think we want to take these poems and the ones on the numbered pages opposite as counterpoint to each other. And here’s where I want to talk about the flavor of this book as a whole: this book is an evaluation. It evaluates the