On the Saturday night reading of the 2002 Dodge Poetry Festival, Stanley Kunitz remembers being rocked on his feet by Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur,” found as he was rummaging through the Harvard stacks. His poem “Touch Me” had a similar effect on me when I first opened to it in the pages of... The New Yorker, I think. It struck me with that chord of longing and rabid jealousy that the great poems evoke in me. It was around that time that I made the pilgrimage to the 92nd Street Y to attend his 90th birthday celebration. I remember the jokes he made about... Ben Jonson, was it?... and how Ben Jonson laughed at being the oldest poet, still publishing at around 90?
Other poems have wrought that effect on me, the wish that I had the skill to write in such a way, that I could touch someone like that. Stephen Dobyns’s “Missed Chances.” Edward Estlin Cummings’s poems. Weldon Kees, alas. William Butler Yeats.
5:48:02 PM 
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