Dear Kurl,
Will you permit me a random observation on the group of little JOs who’ve taken to habitually hassling me (I call them, collectively, the butcherboys)? It’s difficult for me to focus on any other letter-writing topic when, just before class, my satchel was co-opted by the butcherboys and flung onto the roof of the school.
You may or may not have noticed a certain little JO named Christopher Dowell in the group. Now, there’s a young man who, you can be sure, will never earn himself a cool nickname. In my experience, it’s always the one in the group whose own position is most precarious, the one who walks the thin, thin line between insider and outcast—you can count on it, it’ll be him who hits the hardest, who laughs the loudest. The other butcherboys don’t particularly care whether I live or die, but this one, this Dowell—he’s the one who really hates me. Because Dowell knows, and he knows I know, that he’s a lot closer to being like me than his so-called friends are.
I was sorry to read about your father passing away. I hadn’t realized we’d both lost a parent; in an oblique, circumstantial way, this gives us something in common.
You sounded somewhat depressed in your last letter. I hope you’re not regretting your decision to stop playing football? I am going to assume, Kurl, that if you want to share with me your reasons for quitting the football team in such a dramatic and precipitous manner, you will. I’m curious, of course. But as I sat there earlier today in Math, rereading Bron’s Herald story under my desk, I suddenly thought about what it must be like for you, at school and maybe at home, too, being continually judged for your actions and asked to explain yourself to everyone.
Please don’t feel any obligation to explain anything to me. My point is quite the opposite: I want to invite you to feel free to use the space of these letters to talk about things that actually interest you, to muse about the topics that dominate your thoughts when you’re alone. We might as well take advantage of the fact that we don’t owe each other anything, that no one else is ever going to read what we’re writing, that it’s just me and you and whatever we feel like saying.
Let me be the first to enact this advice. Here is what I’m currently thinking: If you’ve concluded that Walt Whitman is, in your words, a douche, then you’ve failed to properly appreciate the extent to which he threw himself, body and soul, into the workaday life of nineteenth-century New York City. I’m enclosing a few photocopied pages of “Song of Myself.” Have a look at the sheer variety of the types of people and activities he describes. The fishing boats, the funeral, the washerwomen, the beehives, the church choir—all on one page of the poem. Maybe you can give me your interpretation of it, and then in my next letter I’ll share with you what I think it means. We’ll both be wrong and right.
Poetry’s like that, Kurl: slippery and coy. It means different things to different readers. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed if it makes you nervous. You’re not alone in that reaction. Look at Mr. Carlsen. He’d rather see Major British Poets being kicked down the hallway than read, let alone discussed, studied, cherished.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk