Tim, when we met I was 27. I had just posted my first poem on Eratosphere. I thought it was pretty hot stuff, and the membership received it very well indeed. I was basking in their praise, and being pretty obvious about it, when, to my surprise, I got a private message from you. (I googled you and was thrilled to discover that you were a Big Deal.) Your note was two lines long: the first told me my poem was pretty good but ought to be a lot better, and the second told me to send you my three best poems. I gasped - I didn't *have* three good poems - but I sent you what I had, along with a whole lot of prefatory hemming and hawing.
Your response to those? One line this time. You told me I might have some talent but that I should bear in mind that, by the time Keats was my age, he'd been dead two years.
Is it coming through in this note that I *loved* these exchanges? So much that, 15 years later, I still reflect on what they mean for me as a writer and as a man? Because I did. I do.
We went on like that for years, Tim. I would try desperately to please you, and you would be encouraging -- but without ever calling a turd a souffle. And I tried to sell you an awful lot of souffle.
Sometimes, I would use you to sharpen my claws. You would write "Red State Reveille," and I would parody it in "Blue State Epiphany." It never occurred to me to treat you as if you might be vulnerable. You always seemed big to me, big enough and strong enough to hold the bag however hard I punched it. It never occurred to me you could topple (except when you tippled). You felt to me as a whetstone must feel to a knife.
There was a period when your paternal tendencies, which were always strong, became especially pronounced. There were a bunch of us Young Turks bellowing on the boards, taking aim at you (as it now seems to me), and getting tired of being treated as the juvenile unit. And the way you responded made me feel like you'd been in on the game the whole time, that your provocations had been, in fact, meant to provoke us, and that you were pleased with what they had surfaced. You wrote that wonderful, eponymous poem for Aaron Poochigan (
http://mirror.ogbuji.net/www.the-fle...oochigian.html). And privately, you wrote one for me. You sent it with an apology, the kind of apology I might have sent you at 27: you confessed that the poem hadn't turned out, you were sorry about that, but you wanted me to have it because you wanted me to know you'd had the thought. As it turns out, your talent knew something about the difference in careers that Aaron and I would have, certainly before I knew it, perhaps before you knew it. But I felt so special to have been included among your boys. Still do.
Tim, one day, when we had known each other several years, the strangest thing happened: I wrote some lines that actually pleased you. They pleased you, actually, much more than they pleased others; unlike my first poem on Eratosphere, this one came in for some tough criticism. But I felt, and you saw, that I had finally hooked something worth catching, and you weren't going to let me snap the line through inexperience. You emailed me (!) directly and privately, and you passed the poem on to a very prominent poet, again privately. I know you must have done this hundreds of times over the years, for dozens of poets who were, for the first time, in danger of writing an actual poem. The prominent poet responded, you gave me pointers, and I went off to work on it. I ended up lousing it up; despite your best efforts, it's still in a drawer -- so this isn't a story about the poem. It's a story about the phone call.
After a couple days passed you asked me for my cell phone number and, voila, all of a sudden I heard a resonant baritone saying "This is Tim." We talked for 15 minutes. It was, frankly, awkward as hell. How could I talk to you? I mainly remember feeling very nervous, not knowing what to say, accepting your praise for the three or four lines I'd written that pleased you, and as quickly as possible steering the conversation away from me. I wheedled you into reciting a poem of yours, "Harvest of Sorrows."
What I know now that I didn't then is that my feelings toward you were a knot of longing and embarrassment, anger and envy - envy for that inexhaustible gift of yours, a fountain of verse that spilled forth from you in gluts and torrents (which might have been part of what left you so thirsty). And though I knew you through your gift, you were, in fact, a man. A man with a voice talking on the phone, just another person in the body, as frail as any other.
I wish I had taken the right thing from that lesson, and stayed closer to you, Tim. It's been many years since that phone call, and many since we last had contact. It's odd to me that now I'm saying goodbye to you through the medium where we first met, that I'm typing this into the familiar old text box of Eratosphere. I've never forgotten you, Tim, or how much you gave to this community of poets and erstwhile poets, and I'll never forget what you gave to me, in word and deed. Every bit of it is treasure.
Rest easy and safe voyage.
Much love,
Clay
To all
Hybrid Mode
