His Only Merit

<p>When I finished compiling poems for my collection entitled <em>Old Man Looking through a Window at Night</em> I thought I was done writing poetry. After all it had taken twenty-six years to collect enough work for another full-length collection. I was sixty-six years old; there did not seem time enough to gather poems for another book.</p><p>Then I read <em>The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens </em>the 1954 Knopf edition. Immediately I started writing responses to the work. Some of the reactions became after poems; some of the writing sounded like a reply. I conversed with Stevens' poetry and I conversed with Stevens the man. Sometimes we argued; sometimes we agreed. Within a month I had nineteen poems-this chapbook.</p><p></p><p>The nineteen poems allowed me to acknowledge Stevens' influence as a modern poet using my landscape--a high desert canyon in New Mexico--as the setting. The language is mine; the vocabulary is mine (even if Stevens' work prodded me toward intellectual abstraction).Reading Stevens produced nineteen poems definitely un-modern the true work of a spiritual introvert living under a ribbon of sky between steep walls of rock.</p><p></p>