GLR November-December 2022

which would have required full-time teaching. No, he wanted time for his writing and, I assume, didn’t care about the title “professor.” That meant pulling down a smaller salary, but money wasn’t a high priority for him. In the following years, I read his books and got to know more about him. My guess about his sexuality was confirmed. English by birth, he’d immigrated to the States mainly to be with his American partner, a theater director named Mike Kitay, who’d come to England to study, like Thom, at Cam bridge. It was the beginning of a lifelong relationship. But the official reason for his expatriation was that he’d received a fellowship (what the British call a “studentship”) at Stanford to take courses with Yvor Winters. Winters was a professor poet rather on the margins of the American poetry scene, partly because he was anti-Romantic, urging the importance of reason in poetry, and partly because his poems used tradi tional meter and rhyme, just as Thom’s did. And then there was San Francisco’s unofficial poet laureate, Robert Duncan. I don’t think Thom knew about him until some years later, but Duncan became important to him, not so much because the San Franciscan’s poetics could be appropriated, but because he was the one of the first U.S. writers to live and write openly as a gay man. San Francisco’s very large openly gay commu nity can only have seemed a promised land to Thom, native of a country where most queer folk stayed resolutely in the closet. In the mid-1970s, I began publishing my books and, at some point, sent something like a fan letter to Thom. He an swered it, but on a postcard, like all the others he later sent. (While none of these are included in the letters volume men tioned above, they are deposited at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library.) In his poem “Interruption,” he says: “I manage my mere voice on postcards best.” Only close friends ever got a full-dress letter, I gather, but his postcards always managed to say something substantial. I continued to write to him. Mean while in my third book I began using traditional meter and rhyme, prompted partly by Thom’s example. I hoped he would, at least on that basis, like it, but, in one of his post cards, he said he found it “disappointing.” I shouldn’t feel too bad, because elsewhere poets as grand as Wordsworth, Auden, Ashbery and Merrill are resoundingly dismissed. Truly origi nal writers tend to give low marks to others because develop ing a style and a distinctive subject matter forces you to exclude other possibilities. From 1977 to 1982 I lived in New Haven, partnered with J. D. (“Sandy”) McClatchy, who taught at Yale. When he wasn’t given tenure, we moved to New York, temporarily renting James Merrill’s New York apartment on East 72nd Street, at which James (or “Jimmy,” as we called him) only occasionally stayed. The following September, during an exchange of mes sages, Thom mentioned that he was coming to New York. I in vited him to drop by; he accepted. I introduced Sandy to this tallish, lean man dressed much as his Modern Poets photo had pictured him. He was aloof and ironic in manner, maybe slightly condescending. He said he had met Jimmy some years before, in Berlin, as far back as 1961. He was somewhat inter ested to hear that we were staying in his apartment. We, as well as Jimmy, had read his favorable review of Mirabell: Books of Number , which had appeared a few years earlier in The San November–December 2022

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