I have an uninterrogated belief that all language is accessible to the dead. I have trouble conceiving of the afterlife, but of this I am sure: either retroactively or in their present state, the dead receive our transmissions. And though I ought to have written this letter earlier, it’s only now that I know what it contains. Dear John, last winter walking through the crowded AWP bookfair, I bumped into a writer I hadn’t seen in twenty years. In your fall 1996 poetry workshop, C and I sat across the table from each other. I remember C in ironic polo shirts, maybe a club vibe. I leaned thrift store and was bad at parties (I went to them, I acted weird). Here we were in 2017 looking like the middle-aged Gen X parents we are. We knew each other immediately and smiled. We’re friends on social media, of course, and I follow his writing, but I’d like to think we really remember each other from your heavy wooden seminar table in Olin Hall. We hugged, caught up. Mostly, we talked about you. How we channel you in our teaching, how we try to model your patience. You were so patient with us! As kids, we hadn’t read Moore or Bishop. Do you remember that? You didn’t judge us, unkempt readers, but the following week brought copious photocopies. My introduction to “The Fish.” Somehow I got it in my head that Moore and Bishop were buried in our little graveyard on the dirt road shortcut that connected North and South campus. Over time, I’d come to picture them holding hands. I imagined you’d told us that, until I one day said it aloud. My memory righted itself. You’d simply described the complex friendship that led me to imagine such an internment! You brought us translations and hoaxes and the first literary journals I’d ever held. When a student submitted a snide caricature of teen mothers at the mall, you weren’t unkind to her, but to my great relief duly firm in your critique. I would file away your articulate expressions—how to hold one’s gaze softly on a student or class, which, though generally beloved, has surprised even your seasoned self with something blunt and foolish. How to communicate happier surprise, lights flipping on behind the brow. How to simultaneously contain and communicate delight in the corners of one’s mouth. You were often delighted.
In my end-of-semester crit, you said “There is something almost Plath-like in the intensity she brings to poetry.” It was a warm ingot, your approval not just of me, but of her before she was de rigueur in the classroom. You might remember handing me a newspaper clipping, detail from a painting by de Kooning that you’d found in the Times. It reminded you of one of my poems. I’ve moved a dozen times since then, but I carry that with me. I carry the issue of our little campus journal Sui Generis to which you generously contributed. I carry that crit with your signature and the odd edges where your typewriter ribbon faltered.
Not unlike you—though I’d never imagine my memory quite so vast or precise—not unlike you, I remember everything. I remember my plaid flannel skirt the day I rushed in almost late having had lunch with my ex whom I still wasn’t over, but loving poetry more than enough to ditch him in the parking lot outside South Hall. I remember R’s poem that would get published in APR, the sestina including Mozart, breasts, elephants. I remember he was a Rhodes Scholar and I said something very naive in a conversation with him about Can Xue, which I’d still like to amend. I remember A whose hair reminded me of a rooster’s comb wrote a poem called Arcadia, and one about February I quite liked, or was that Z the Marxist who would pretend to have married the glamorous D senior year, but they were just having us on? I remember there were a lot of young straight white men in that class who admired you and sought your favor, but it neither softened nor hardened you toward them. I remember you were the advisor of a brilliant young woman whose gorgeous poems were nothing like yours. She wrote you a faintly psychedelic homage. I remember I trusted you to read us, read to us, and guide us. I remember how well I deserved that A-, too. A little minus for the half-semester it took me to gain purchase. Hard-won you said of my advances, and they were. I remember you had startling bright eyes, you know that, everyone knows that, and your voice was agile. You liked a good joke, you told a good joke. I would see you while I was in the city, I’d meet visual artists you worked with, and have teachers who studied you. I’d think of you as I walked past O’Hara’s residence. Later you would say of me, Danielle Pafunda, I remember her. And that would strike me very fine praise. I don’t talk a lot about having studied with you. I don’t know if it’s apparent in my work—certainly no one ever says so. What I do know is that when I later took my comprehensive exams, reading 300 books that year, writing off-the-cuff 9-page exams in 3-hours, speaking in a 3-hour blur for orals, coming out bruised and grinning and sure I could feel my brain’s neural pathways bloom, that was how it felt to read your work when I was young, and how it remains now that I’m middle.
Too many of my professors have passed out of the world, particularly too many from Bard, a strange and precious home. I took this one hard. I cried because the slippage of retrospect in which I know that without you I’d have been some other poet. So might every poet I know be some other poet. I cried wishing I’d stayed near home and spent more hours with you. I cried because you’d been the teacher of my teachers and my teachers themselves were grieving. I cried because I was so glad to cry over something warm and rich and wonderful when these past many months have been pulling from us quick, lean, salted sobs. My heart was inside out. My head, too, unfurled. Anyhow, thank you for everything, for every single thing you gave me, and the things you gave my friends and admireds. Thank you for writing poems I can reread until the end of poems which is never, and read aloud to my gentle 8-year-old who favors Schuyler and O’Hara, and now you, he says, hmmm that’s a very good poem, it’s calming and interesting. I wish you gentle passage, I send my love, I’ll hope to apprehend you when I'm too gone home to the light or whatever is next.
Danielle Pafunda is the author of eight books, including The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books 2017), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books 2013), and the forthcoming Beshrew That Heart That Makes My Heart To Groan (Dusie Press Books).