Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...substitute teacher at the Christopher Gibson School in the mostly Negro Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. A summa cum laude Harvard graduate and former Rhodes Scholar, Kozol was badly shaken by the experience-which ended abruptly when he was fired after reading to his class a poem by Negro Langston Hughes that was not on the teachers' approved reading list; it suggested that tenement tenants might justifiably put the slug on their landlords...
...class wondered if readers tended to identify the poet with this persona. Dickey replied, "Yes, and that's not the first time that's happened. The best letter I ever had on a poem was an unsigned letter with no return address, from New York City. Someone wrote to me and said, 'I recently read your poem "The Fiend" in the Partisan Review. I'm a member of the New York City Police Department--the vice squad--and I just wanted you to know, Mr. Dickey, that I've always had a lot of sympathy for you fellows.'. . . The real...
...continued: "It took me God's own time to write that poem. . . . I thought about the sexual thing. You can read all the sex manuals in the world, about married love, manipulation . . . you come to the conclusion that society wants you to have a certain kind of sexual life and sexual response. But that may or may not be the one that you do have. The man in "The Fiend" is a voyeur--as I say, don't knock it if you ain't tried it. I thought of the fiend as one who had come to a tacit understanding...
Though he has been connected with various universities, he is no convinced academic. The writing of a poem, he thinks, implies a one-to-one relationship between poet and reader, and he is distrustful of group studies of poetry "where the poem is laid up on the seminar table like a dead cat for dissection, all with a great steaming-up of academic glasses...
...even for academics. He has important things on his mind. To put a cap on a conversation, he said, "One part of me is a very scholarly person--I like to read long monographs on Keats's prosody--but the other part is someone who has never seen a poem before. When I really want to enter the deep part of writing, it's as though I had never read anything before. I want to write each poem as if it were my first--not only my first, but anybody's first...