My copy of poet Tess Gallagher’s A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (The University of Michigan Press, 1986; part of the Poets on Poetry series, Donald Hall, Editor) was a gift from my friend, Doris, in 1994 from the now-closed Hungry Mind Bookstore in St. Paul. It is heavily underlined, particularly under eloquent passages connecting poetry and memory, as in the essay titled “My Father’s Love Letters.” Gallagher grew up, as I did, for a time, amid the logging-fishing-papermaking landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and she also suffered the death of a brother when she was twenty. (I was just turned twenty-one when my own brother died.) When I read this passage, I felt she was speaking for me:

“After my youngest brother’s death when I was twenty, I began to recognize the ability of poetry to extend the lives of those not present except as memory. My brother’s death was the official beginning of my mortality….It was as though memory were a kind of flickering shadow left behind by those who had died.”

This collection of essays is filled to bursting with thoughts that catch me up. Definitely time to read these essays with the even stronger sense of my own mortality and joy in poetry that I have now, a quarter-century later!

I have to confess that looking over this list engenders “poetic essay lust,” if such a term exists. I don’t have many of these, but I have a long-standing reverence for the poetry of Amy Clampitt and a fairly recently kindled blaze of admiration for the poetry of William Matthews, so perhaps I will be filling in the gaps of my shelves later this year. For now, I will simply say “Thank you, Donald Hall and the University of Michigan Press” for assembling this chorus of thought on a subject important to us all!

Regarding the Poem “Mizzling”:

As an early responder noted, this poem emerged from a painful memory, not one I recall very often but evoked by thinking about that word, “mizzling,” and the near constant rain of my grade school days in Oregon. I remember that walk to school, and that my shoes were almost always wet. I remember losing the coins and being plunged into despair, and that it was lightly raining. I don’t remember if I found them or which coins, exactly, I was allowed to take, but my amateur coin-collector dad had all of those mentioned in the poem in his collection. We did spend hours discussing and examining coins (and also currency), an enthusiasm that Dad had gained from his first job as a paper boy. He also had a vast collection of WW II “steelies,” the subject of a poem during my first year participating in the April poem challenge.

Until tomorrow, yours from a sunny and sweet April day in Northfield, Minnesota,

LESLIE