Dear Tim, Mike, Len, "Shameless," and now Robert Mezey--
I've been trying for days to "post a reply" in order to tell you all how delighted I am to be treated with such critical kindness by poets like all of you. But, alas, I am badly technologically challenged, and have been facing the same kind of speechless frustration I endured during my first few months in this country, when I had a million things to say and couldn't get them out "een Eengleesh"! Let's hope I succeed this time in communicating in Computerese.
Thank you, all of you, for all your reassuring comments. What you say, Mike, about Plath and Sexton, strikes me as true of all poets: there's nobody whose work pleases you entirely, or equally well in every poem. I think it's always a matter of picking and choosing, and I hope that the 3 guys in the future who remember I ever lived will be able to come up with 3 poems apiece that they like! That will give me a 9-poem spot in literary memory, which is probably way too optimistic, but I've always been a hopeful type.
Yuo and I have been trading remarks about James Fenton, and he's a case in point. I've read poems of his that I couldn't finish, because they didn't hold my interest at all. But he's also written several that I love, and one--the one I sent you, titled "Nothing"--which is one of my all-time favorites, for its simplicity of diction, unobtru-sive musicality, and truthfulness about a certain human ex-perience, the recognition of complete hopelessness. If I never read another by him that touches me so completely again, I will still think of him as a "favorite poet" for that one. The question is, how do we remember people, for their successes or their failures?
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