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Unread 07-28-2002, 03:11 PM
Joe Aimone Joe Aimone is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Houston, TX
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Let me second Tim's endorsement. From the poems of <u>The Lovemaker</u> to "Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)," Bob has almost never written a poem not worth deep study and even outright reverence. (He might disagree, perhaps, but I hope not, because he would be wrong on that one point.)

And I can also say that he is one of the few teachers, of poetry or anything else, that one inevitably learns something important from, regardless of one's state of mind or receptivity. About this, I can speak first hand, having been one of his students, and more receptive than I knew, though probably not the best student. (He first taught me when I was an undergraduate longer ago than either of us probably want to recall.)

Moreover, Bob is the best person in the world to learn to read poetry aloud from. If you have never heard him read his work, or the work of other poets he loves, your life as an appreciator of the spoken word is incomplete. It's been a bit over twenty years since I learned that. And the effect is universal, as more recent experience proves: I watched a room of over a hundred people, stacked knee to knee and covering the floor, in a reading to commemorate Wallace Stevens, hushed to pindrop silence by his reading (the first public one, I think) of "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words: A Cento." Robert Hass was also on the program, and may have drawn the crowd, but people hubbubed and chitchatted while Hass mangled unprepared minds and muddled his way through a silly lecture that essentially identified Stevens as only a precursor to Hass. But Bob Mezey hypnotized the buggers into that sane and serious space he keeps alive in the world, along with his wicked sense of humor, delivering a tribute to Stevens that was, if anything, better than most of Stevens. (Certainly Bob is better reader than Stevens ever was: check the recordings of Stevens, then listen to Bob.)

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