Proofreading a book with Professor Albert Gelpi in Summer 1986

In summer 1986, I spent many warm afternoons on the deck of the house of Stanford English Professor Albert Gelpi, where we were proofreading the galleys of his book "A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance 1910-1950". That spring, I had met him in his course on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We would take turns reading the manuscript out loud and reading along in the galleys, and we even mentioned every punctuation mark. I had not thought of that project in a long time, until yesterday, when I read the chapter on Adrienne Rich in Al's 2015 book "American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 February 2025)