“Years ago–it would have been 1956 or 1957–when I was a teenager, married, earning my living as a delivery boy for a pharmacist in Yakima, a small town in eastern Washington, I drove with a prescription to a house in the upscale part of town. I was invited inside by an alert but very elderly man wearing a cardigan sweater. He asked me to please wait in his living room while he found his checkbook.
There were a lot of books in that living room. Books were everywhere, in fact, on the coffee table and end tables, on the floor next to the sofa–every available surface had become the resting place for books. There was even a little library over against one wall of the room. (I’d never seen a personal library before; rows and rows of books arranged on built in shelves in someone’s private residence.) While I waited, eyes moving around, I noticed on his coffee table a magazine with a singular and, for me, startling name on its cover: Poetry. I was astounded, and I picked it up. It was my first glimpse of a “little magazine,” not to say a poetry magazine, and I was dumbstruck. Maybe I was greedy: I picked up a book, too, something called The little Review Anthology, edited by Margaret Anderson. (I should add that is was a mystery to me just then what “edited by” meant.) I fanned the pages of the magazine and, taking still more liberty, began to leaf through the pages of the book. There were lots of poems in the book, but also prose pieces and what looked like remarks or even pages of commentary on each of the selections. What on earth was all this? I wondered. I’d never before seen a book like it–nor, of course, a magazine like Poetry. I looked from one to the other of these publications, and secretly coveted each of them.
When the old gentleman had finished writing out his check, he said, as if reading my heart, “Take that book with you, son. You might find something in there you’ll like. Are you interested in poetry? Why don’t you take the magazine, too? Maybe you’ll write something yourself someday. If you do, you’ll need to know where to send it.”
Where to send it. Something–I didn’t know just what, but I felt something momentous happening. I was eighteen or nineteen years old, obsessed with the need to “write something,” and by then I’d made a few clumsy attempts at poems. But it had never really occurred to me that there might be a place where one actually sent these efforts in hopes they would be read and even, just possibly–incredibly, or so it seemed–considered for publication. But right there in my hand was visible proof that there were responsible people somewhere out there in the great world who produced, sweet Jesus, a monthly magazine of poetry. I was staggered. I felt, as I’ve said, in the presence of revelation. I thanked the old gentleman several times over, and left his house. I took his check to my boss, the pharmacist, and I took Poetry and The Little Review book home with me. And so began an education.
Of course, I can’t recall the names of any of the contributors to that tissue of the magazine. Most likely there were a few distinguished older poets alongside new, “unknown” poets, much the same situation that exists within the magazine today. Naturally I hadn’t heard of anyone in those days–or read anything either, for that matter, modern, contemporary or otherwise. I do remember I noted the magazine had been founded in 1912 by a woman named Harriet Monroe. I remember the date because that was the year my father had been born. Later that night, bleary from reading, I had the distinct feeling my life as in the process of being altered in some significant and even, forgive me, magnificent way.
In the anthology, as I recall, there was serious talk about “modernism” in literature, and the role played in advancing modernism by a man bearing the strange name of Ezra Pound. Some of his poems, letters and lists of rules–the do’s and don’t’s for writing–had been included in the anthology. I was told that, early in the life of Poetry, this Ezra Pound had served as a foreign editor for the magazine–the same magazine which had on that day passed into my hands. Further, Pound had been instrumental in introducing the work of a large number of new poets to Monroe’s magazine, as well as to The Little Review, of course; he was, as everyone knows, a tireless editor and promoter–poets with names like H. D., T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Richard Aldington, to cite only a handful. There was discussion and analysis of poetry movements; imagism, I remember, was one of those movements. I learned that, in addition to The Little Review, Poetry was one of the magazines hospitable to imagist writing. By then I was reeling. I don’t see how I could have slept much that night.
This was back in 1956 or 1957, as I’ve said. So what excuse is there for the fact that it took me twenty-eight years or more to finally send off some work to Poetry? None. The amazing thing, the crucial factor, is that when I did send something, in 1984, the magazine was still around, still alive and well, and edited, as always, by responsible people whose goal it was to keep this unique enterprise running and in sound order, And one of those people wrote to me in his capacity as editor, praising my poems, and telling me the magazine would published six of them in due course.
Did I feel proud and good about this? Of course I did. And I believe thanks are due in part to that anonymous and lovely old gentleman who gave me his copy of the magazine. Who was he? He would have to be long dead now and the contents of his little library dispersed to whatever small, eccentric, but probably not in the end very valuable collections go–the second-hand bookstores. I’d told him that day I would read his magazine and read the book, too and I’d get back to him about what I thought. I didn’t do that, of course. Too many other things intervened; it was a promise easily given and broken the moment the door closed behind me. I never saw him again, and I don’t know his name. I can only say this encounter really happened, and in much the way I’ve described. I was just a pop them, but nothing can explain away, such a moment: the moment when the very thing I needed most in my life–call it polestar–was casually, generously given to me. Nothing remotely approaching that moment has happened since.”
—Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall, 1989
