The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me

snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting

you were beautiful; goodbye,

Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain

brown envelopes for the return of your very

“Clinical Sonnets”; goodbye, manufacturer

of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues

give the fullest treatment in literature yet

to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,

who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,”

instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long,

neat-scripted letters demolishing

the pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way

of cheering myself up, as I licked

the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,

the game I had

of trying to guess which one of you, this time,

had poisoned his glue. I did care.

I did read each poem entire.

I did say what I thought was the truth

in the mildest words I knew. And now,

in this poem, or chopped prose, not any better,

I realize, than those troubled lines

I kept sending back to you,

I have to say I am relieved it is over:

at the end I could feel only pity

for that urge toward more life

your poems kept smothering in words, the smell

of which, days later, would tingle

in your nostrils as new, God-given impulses

to write.

Goodbye,

you who are, for me, the postmarks again

of shattered towns—Xenia, Burnt Cabins, Hornell—

their loneliness

given away in poems, only their solitude kept.

GALWAY KINNELL