Now Bob Mezey lays down his lariatship and is succeeded by his exact contemporary, Rhina Espaillat. How fortunate we are that these distinguished poet-scholars engage in conversation with us. Robert has been commissioned by the Everyman Library to produce an anthology of poets of the American West, a book to which we can all look forward, containing as it will Cunningham, Winters, Lewis, Barnes, Bowers, and other poets with whom our members may be insufficiently familiar. So he will be absent from our pages for a while, but I hope he will look in now and then and straighten us out on the meters.

His editions of Hardy and Robinson are indispensable texts for any serious poet who lacks the Collected Poems of either. His Collected Borges--when it appears fifty years from now, copyright problems having been resolved--will be the indispensable translation of the man who might be the greatest poet of the 20th Century. In any language.

I know no more conscientious and competent servant of the Muse than Bob Mezey, whose innermost thoughts we can divine by purchasing his newly issued Collected Poems from the University of Arkansas Press. Bob, we are honored to have you among us. Many thanks, your host

Professor Mezey, I'm very grateful to Ablemuse, and to Tim Murphy, for allowing me the opportunity to eavesdrop on your remarkable conversations with other poets. I've learned a lot from those; they've sent me back to reexamine poems I thought I knew and reconsider issues I thought I had settled in my mind. Thank you for that! I'll miss your stimulating electronic "visits," wish you every joy and success in your new venture, and look forward to your return.