He would encourage me by sharing his own difficulties with writing and publication. He wrote long, elegant notes, musings on family, writing and philosophy. How to explain what that note meant? We began communicating every month by email. It is a testament to the kind of man Dick was that, as a celebrated seventy-four-year-old poet, he wrote to me, a twenty-eight-year-old young writer no one had ever heard of, to tell me how much he had enjoyed my work. I was a brand new poet then, with only a handful of publications. Dick and I first began writing in 2013, when my poem, “When the Men Go Off to War” appeared on the site Verse Daily. For years, were friends in a way that has long been out of style-we wrote to each other. His last published book was titled Zen Master Poems, which was inspired by his interest in Buddhist mysticism.ĭick and I never met in person. He would have appreciated the cyclical implication of that. It was fitting that he died on Christmas, a day of birth. The author of nine books of poetry and a former Poet Laureate of Connecticut, Dick was a formidable presence in American literature. Last year, on Christmas Day, the poet Dick Allen passed away.
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