His Only Merit

When I finished compiling poems for my collection entitled Old Man Looking through a Window at Night, I thought I was done writing poetry. After all, it had taken twenty-six years to collect enough work for another full-length collection. I was sixty-six years old; there did not seem time enough to gather poems for another book.

Then, I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, the 1954 Knopf edition. Immediately, I started writing responses to the work. Some of the reactions became "after" poems; some of the writing sounded like a reply. I conversed with Stevens' poetry, and I conversed with Stevens, the man. Sometimes we argued; sometimes we agreed. Within a month, I had nineteen poems-this chapbook.

The nineteen poems allowed me to acknowledge Stevens' influence as a modern poet using my landscape--a high desert canyon in New Mexico--as the setting. The language is mine; the vocabulary is mine (even if Stevens' work prodded me toward intellectual abstraction).Reading Stevens produced nineteen poems, definitely un-modern, the true work of a spiritual introvert living under a ribbon of sky between steep walls of rock.