Friday, October 18, 2013

Well worth doing …

… A Commonplace Blog: Remembering JVC.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Sometime back in the '70s, I reviewed Cunningham's  Collected Poems. Not long after I got a letter from him thanking me. I remember he said that it was "nice to be praised for the things one would want to be praised for." I replied and asked him if he would look at some of my poems. I was at the time playing around a lot with medieval verse forms, villanelles and the like. He told me to send along some, and he wrote back with the best advice I ever got about my poetry: "You have perfected a style. Now you have to learn what to do with it." I probably still have those letters around somewhere.

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