Collected Prose

of his stories that day went on for thirty or forty minutes, and no matter how far he seemed to drift from the point he was supposedly trying to make, he was in complete control. He had the patience that is necessary to the telling of a good story—and the ability to savor the least detail that cropped up along the way. What at first seemed to be an endless series of digressions, a kind of aimless wandering, turned out to be the elaborate and systematic construction of a circle. For example: why did you come back to New York after living in Hollywood? There followed a myriad of little incidents: meeting the brother of a certain man on a park bench, the color of someone’s eyes, an economic crisis in some country. Fifteen minutes later, just when I was beginning to feel hopelessly lost—and convinced that Reznikoff was lost, too—he would begin a slow return to his starting point. Then, with great clarity and conviction, he would announce: “So that’s why I left Hollywood.” In retrospect, it all made perfect sense.
    I heard stories about his childhood, his aborted career in journalism, his law studies, his work for his parents as a jobber of hats and how he would write poems on a bench at Macy’s while waiting his turn to show the store buyer his samples. There were also stories about his walks—in particular, his journey from New York to Cape Cod (on foot!), which he undertook when he was well past sixty. The important thing, he explained, was not to walk too fast. Only by forcing himself to keep to a pace of less than two miles per hour could he be sure to see everything he wanted to see.
    On my visit that day, I brought along for him a copy of my first book of poems, Unearth , which had just been published. This evoked a story from Reznikoff that strikes me as significant, especially in the light of the terrible neglect his work suffered for so many years. His first book, he told me, had been published in 1918 by Samuel Roth (who would later become famous for pirating Ulysses and his role in the 1933 court case over Joyce’s book). The leading American poet of the day was Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Reznikoff had sent him a copy of the book, hoping for some sign of encouragement from the great man. One afternoon Reznikoff was visiting Roth in his bookstore, and Robinson walked in. Roth went over to greet him, and Reznikoff, standing in the back corner of the shop, witnessed the following scene. Roth proudly gestured to the copies of Reznikoff’s book that were on display and asked Robinson if he had read the work of this fine young poet. “Yeah, I read the book,” said Robinson in a gruff, hostile voice, “and I thought it was garbage.”
    “And so,” said Reznikoff to me in 1974, “I never got to meet Edwin Arlington Robinson.”
    It was not until I was putting on my coat and getting ready to leave that Reznikoff said anything about the piece I had sent him. It had been composed in an extremely dense and cryptic style, wrestling with issues that Reznikoff himself had probably never consciously thought about, and I had no idea what his reaction would be. His silence about it during our long conversation led me to suspect that he had not liked it.
    “About your article,” he said, almost off-handedly. “It reminds me of something that once happened to my mother. A stranger walked up to her on the street one day and very kindly and graciously complimented her on her beautiful hair. Now, you must understand that my mother had never prided herself on her hair and did not consider it to be one of her better features. But, on the strength of that stranger’s remark, she spent the rest of the day in front of her mirror, preening and primping and admiring her hair. That’s exactly what your article did to me. I stood in front of the mirror for the whole afternoon and admired myself.”
    *

    Several weeks later, I received a letter from Reznikoff about my book. It was filled with praise, and the numerous quotations from the poems convinced me that he was in earnest—that he had actually sat down and read the book. Nothing could have meant more to me.
    A few years after Reznikoff’s death, a letter came to me from La Jolla, written by a friend who works in the American Poetry Archive at the University of California library—where Reznikoff’s papers had recently been sold. In going through the material, my friend told me, he had come across Reznikoff’s copy of Unearth . Astonishingly, the book