Monday, February 23rd

BACK TO A NORMALLY cool day, after this disconcerting week of very warm damp weather, and back from four days at the Notre Dame University literary festival. I went in fear and trembling, exhilarated by the prospect of meeting Louis Simpson, Stanley Kunitz, and Galway Kinnell, as I see so few poets, and these are all three ones for whom I have respect—fearful that I would not fulfill Michelle Quinn’s expectations. The festival is run by the sophomore class … they choose the writers they want, and Michelle, the sophomore chairman, had especially wanted me to come.

It turned out to be a true festival, everyone filled with love and joy. Such an audience! Standing room only, with six hundred seated in a charming auditorium. Louis Simpson had been so fine the night before, the wry delicate tone so very different from mine—I wondered how my work would stand up, especially as I was reading from As We Are Now, as well as poems. It did … dear Michelle was sobbing as the applause swelled and swelled, and I remembered how when I was her age I did that sometimes in the Old Civic Repertory days, weeping from a kind of joy. What moved me most, perhaps, was the way some of the women professors and instructors came to thank me, saying, “You don’t know what you have done for us.” (I was the only woman writer at the festival).

That was one part of the experience. The other, even more important to me, was to hear those three good poets read. I have been starved for that, to feel myself part of the communion of poets again, to learn from my peers. It gave me a new sense of confidence in what I am doing now—not in strict form. I saw very well how such poems can have momentum and thrust, and even float the hearer on their music. Reading Kinnell on the plane home I came upon this, part 4 of Spindrift:

I sit listening

To the surf as it falls.

The power and inexhaustible freshness of the sea,

The suck and inner boom

As a wave tears free and crashes back

In overlapping thunders going away down the beach.

It is the most we know of time,

And it is our undermusic of eternity.

Many doors opened for me during the four days, among them someone giving me Tillich’s The Shaking of the Foundations after we had been talking in the student coffee shop and eating doughnuts. It sounds like nothing—a casual meeting with a young man and a young woman, both instructors at the university. But in that atmosphere of the festival it had great force. I needed this book. It has solved (the chapter called “Waiting” especially) something that has been troubling me for a very long time. It has helped me back to a state of grace.

In that same half hour the young man told me that his aunt is Catherine O’Leary, who worked for us as housekeeper for many years in Cambridge, who loved my mother. It is wonderful that I can now write to her and send her I Knew a Phoenix. It made me so happy!