come over to do the most maniacal electric guitar solo blowing every goddamned hippie off the stage. Nice show, kiddos, now let me show you how it’s done.
And then there were the poems.
The works themselves were the best teachers. “Montage” and “A Kind of Burning”—if only for these two pieces, your reputation is already cemented in beaming marble. But no. There’s more. A whole lot more, in fact. An entire galaxy of poems breathless in their construction and power. “For chrissake, hold your tongue/ and let me come” was a line from what could probably be the most intense erotic poem we’ll ever read. And we thought we knew the meaning of “erotic.” College deans were not supposed to wax lyrical over orgasms. In many levels, that poem “Love in a Contemporary Key” sent us all back to school with our tails and amateurishly libidinal pens between our legs. I mean, it’s not every day you find a Catholic-school teacher who writes about making love with her husband then all of a sudden their son barges in. ( “…henceforth an alienating chill/scudding across your upright headboard/flipped into stiffened sheets and consciences…” —from “Children and Lovers.”) In more ways than one, you have known the poetry of loss. I, too, have had a glimpse of it when my house was swallowed up by the great floods of September 26, 2009. Never in my wildest acid trips did I imagine our street as one raging sea. By instinct, the first thing I looked for was a copy of your poem “An Unobstructed View,” which you wrote right after your house was razed to the ground. That, for me, remains one of your most powerful works, all the more poignant if only for what it conceals, the element of revelation heightened by its surpris- ingly quiet diction, almost Zen-like in its tempered energy.
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