John Daniel

Keith Woodruff drew my attention to John Daniel's website. John was my first poetry teacher. Here's what I wrote as a comment on Keith's blog:

Thanks for the link to John's web site. It inspired me to drop him a note. I have fond memories of my two workshops with him: reading Bishop and Roethke (among others), looking at Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" as an example of a good song lyric, having my apprentice poems ripped to pieces — in anticipation of their further shredding in Denise Levertov's workshops, until one day she said that a poem of mine needed no workshopping, because it was done. That poem, "The Burning," is the only poem from that period that I still submit anywhere or consider part of a possible manuscript.