No.44 - July 2020
David Graham's POETIC LICENSE July 2020 No.44
This Verdant, Vibrant, & Verbal Village: In Memory of Firestone Feinberg
With the death of Firestone Feinberg the Verse-Virtual community has lost its founding father and a very bright light in many lives. But along
with the sorrow I’m sure we all feel enduring gratitude. I consider myself personally lucky to have had the chance to work with him. In remembering Firestone,
I’d like to honor his memory in a way he might approve of, if I can. By meditating a bit on my interactions with him, I hope to reach toward the core idea
at the heart of his creation, Verse-Virtual.
One regret is that I never met Firestone in person. But in the five and a half years that I knew him via email and the internet, I came to admire him greatly. And in our frequent emails (how did he keep up with all his correspondence?) I got enough of a glimpse of Firestone-the-man (as opposed to Firestone-the-editor) to feel some jealousy for those who did know him more closely. He was unfailingly kind and solicitous. In July of last year, for instance, he wrote to ask me to re-send my monthly submission, for he had misplaced it. I was traveling at the time and did not reply that same day. So this provoked a worried email: “I hope you’re okay. Usually you get right back to me. I don’t know if I should worry.” That email concluded: “I better hear back from you or then I'll officially start worrying.” By the time I replied (the next day) to assure him I was fine, he had of course located the lost submission, but it was clear he cared more about my wellbeing.
My first contact with Firestone was, as I suspect was true for many of us in the early days of Verse-Virtual, a snappy little email asking if I would contribute something to his new journal. I had no idea who he was (is anyone actually named “Firestone”?) or how he had heard of me. Somehow he’d spotted what he called a “spectacular poem” I’d published in The Cortland Review no less than seventeen years prior, and wanted to know if he could re-publish it. I believe I asked how he had heard of me, and how he had run across a rather old poem that I’d never collected in a book.
Of course I had never heard of Verse-Virtual. After some quick Googling, I was able to mention being a friend of Karla Huston, whom he had recently published. He didn’t reply to that comment, and as it happened never did directly answer my questions about how he had discovered me.
But the next day another email arrived, which I still have in my files. He wrote, “Yesterday I didn't see your note about Karla — she's spectacular. I 'found' her like I 'found' you. I know how to pick 'em, what?” And that was that. Without further ado, I was welcomed into this unusual online community of poets that he was building.
From the start I knew I was not dealing with your average literary editor. Everything about our initial exchange was, I soon learned, typical. It wasn’t remotely “professional.” Nothing stuffy or impersonal, ever, from Fire. Always a dash of humor. A bit of absentmindedness and haste. And he cut to the chase: I seldom received a note that was longer than a few lines. But I sure did get a lot of those. And that bubbling ever-present enthusiasm and legendary kindness: of course both Karla Huston and I were deemed “spectacular.” I’ll bet many of you reading this column have received similar praise. (For the record, Karla really is spectacular.)
Though he was definitely a cheerleader for poetry and poets, I quickly observed that he didn’t lack strong opinions. Yes, he was generous and kind to a fault, but he had a firm vision for the sort of journal and community he wanted to see, and he wasn’t shy about communicating that fact, or turning aside from whatever he didn’t view as furthering his vision. I learned also that his taste, which was remarkably free-ranging, was not really negotiable. He seemed to either love or hate a poem. I never did manage to convince him, for example, of the value of haiku and other Asian forms.
He re-published that old poem of mine in the March 2015 issue, and I have happily appeared in every issue since. I told friends that I had found my dream editor, someone who liked a poem or two in every batch I submitted. . . . At some point Firestone formalized the arrangement by making me one of his Contributing Editors, responsible for submitting something every month, along with various duties aimed at encouraging participation in the community he wanted. I moderate the Facebook group V-V Talk, for example. And his charming indifference to the usual professional formalities continued. After he got to know and trust me a bit, sometimes he didn’t even read my contributions before sending me proofs to correct—often right before the issue went live. Then I’d get a note saying something like “Finally had the chance to read your poems—they’re great as usual.” As I say, a poet’s dream editor. . . . But in truth I had found a dream editor in a deeper sense, about which I’ll say more in a little bit.
About a year after our first exchange, with retirement looming, I was looking for a good writing project to take into my post-teaching life. So I wrote Fire to propose doing an occasional column on poetry for Verse-Virtual, whenever the mood struck me, and wondered if he’d be interested. I sent him some links to essays I’d published elsewhere as samples. His response was almost immediate. Good idea, he thought, but it had to be monthly, not occasional. Not even every other month would do. (Forgive me, Firestone, but as soon as you had to step down from editing, alternate months is exactly what I began doing!)
He also felt the samples I sent were way too long. No one wanted to read long prose in a poetry magazine, he announced. Would I be interested, he inquired, in writing “MUCH shorter columns, e.g., three to five paragraphs?” I almost said no, not wanting to commit to a monthly obligation; and not seeing how such abbreviated essays would satisfy or allow me to say anything significant.
In any case, I duly wrote up a short and breezy sample column for him to look at, and he loved it. We were in business. My idea for an overall column title was to borrow the one Virginia Woolf used for her 1925 book of essays, The Common Reader. True confession: I had used that title before, about forty years ago, on a weekly newspaper column I wrote for a small newspaper in Massachusetts. At that point in my life I was newly released from graduate school, and seeking a project to occupy me before beginning my teaching career. I loved then and still love the idea of writing not just for other academics but for any interested readers.
Firestone’s reply to my “Common Reader” sample column is worth quoting, for it gives a real flavor of his personality as editor, encouraging and informal, but always firm about his wishes:
The article is excellent. Its length is perfect. The overall title is terrible.
Forget about Woolf. Too esoteric and, regardless, you are not addressing "the common reader." You are writing to and for a community of poets who are your friends.
I want a simple overall title that includes your name if possible and has a friendly cast to it, if possible. Here are some examples off the top of my head. (These aren't even suggestions. They are just impromptu ideas. We will figure out a title that works for both of us and V-V.)
David Graham's View
David Graham Talks
David Graham Says
David Graham ON POETRY
DG on Poetry, Poems, and Poets
On Poetry, Poems, and Poets by DG
About Poetry... by DG
A Poetic Life by DG
POETRY WORLD
A POET'S LIFE
A LIFE OF POETRY
Poetic License
Talking about Poetry by DG
TALK ABOUT POETRy
I don't want stiffness or formality if we can get away from it. Something clever or light-hearted could be good.
Try thinking along these lines.
Time for me to go to sleep.
'night, --F
That may be the longest email I ever received from him. “I don’t want stiffness or formality” could be Firestone’s motto. Anyway, I gratefully adopted one of his suggestions (“Poetic License”) for my project, and so we were off and running. The initial column appeared in June of 2016. At first I respected Fire’s desire for extreme brevity, but once I had shown him that I could write the kind of prose that he wanted, I did gradually begin allowing myself longer word counts. We never discussed it, but my tightly edited three or four pages sometimes stretched to six or even longer. And he never once complained about their length. By then we were friends, and he made me feel I was a valuable part of this village of poets, as he liked to call it, that he had founded. I gather he made everyone involved feel the same way.
It’s hard to talk about community, I find, without sounding vaporous and sappy. I think this is true, in part, because for too many groups it’s in large part a feel-good abstraction, not an active practice. Every institution, it seems, wants to think of itself in such terms, even the most cold-blooded commercial enterprises. That is why some businesses like to call their (low) wage-earning employees “partners” or “associates”; why K-Mart would employ people called “greeters”; and why every college’s catalog, even the most impersonal research university’s, will invariably include in its mission statement high-minded talk about matters of community.
As we all know, announcing community is easy, but building one is hard. Maintaining it over the long haul is even harder. Real community is like pornography in the old definition: it may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it. Or, I should probably say, when you feel it. For there is a mystery involved. True community cannot simply be announced or willed into being. In an earlier column I wrote about the late Don Sheehan, who for a quarter century nurtured another remarkable poetry community at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. A few parallels between Firestone and Don Sheehan seem notable. One is their insistence on an egalitarian atmosphere. Readings and workshops at The Frost Place regularly included some of the country’s most renowned poets (Charles Simic and Ellen Bryant Voigt, for just two examples); but any who put on airs or acted like big stars were simply not asked back. The atmosphere was strictly informal and welcoming to all. As Sheehan often noted in his introductory remarks to student participants, the annual Frost Conference was a place to study and celebrate poetry, not to advance one’s career or even conduct networking. Unlike at some poetry conferences, the only star was poetry itself.
Another parallel has to do with that vexed matter of literary standards. As Firestone once pointed out to me, Verse-Virtual did not aim to be highly selective, publishing only “the best”; rather, he wanted to present the widest range of poetic voices so long as they were speaking honestly and from the heart. Thus the virtual pages of his journal have included many authors with national reputations and numerous books to their name. It has featured state Poets Laureate such as Marilyn Taylor, Karla Huston, Sydney Lea, and the late Dick Allen. But also high school students who’d never been published before. Academic poets like myself could mingle freely with occasional and non-professional poets who had something to say. The only thing we needed to have in common was a love of poetry. Matters of reputation meant little to Firestone. He was fierce in wanting our contributors’ notes, for instance, not to sound like bragging or academic résumés.
When I think about it, I’m struck by the fact that Firestone welcomed me into the group so freely, given my academic habits and credentials. His antipathy toward anything stuffy or unduly esoteric was likely grounded in unpleasant experience, I imagine. At our worst we academics can certainly be a forbidding and judgmental lot. Too often we make such a fetish of “excellence” and “high standards” that we forget to be kind and humble, mistakes that Fire never made. Did he sometimes include work that wouldn’t meet the professional standards of some blue-chip journals? Sure. I believe he would have been the first to admit it. For that matter, every poet I know has more than occasionally looked through some issue of one of those blue-chip journals, halted at this poem or that, and wondered what on earth were the editors thinking?
Obviously taste is both fickle and variable. There’s no accounting for taste, we all agree: De gustibus non est disputandum, the Latin maxim has advised us for centuries, and in age after age poets, critics, and editors have nodded, while going right on assuming that their own personal taste was infallible. I have no particular beef with those who profess to be upholding high standards, though things get a little murky when you try to define them. In any event, the deeper, more significant truth is that there are other ways of measuring success—fellowship, kindness, curiosity, open-mindedness, egalitarianism. I can almost hear Firestone saying something like, “This isn’t a contest or a race. We’re a community of friends.” Connection and friendship trumped literary connoisseurship.
A related matter would be Firestone’s unwavering insistence that not only should readers and contributors communicate with each other, but that any interaction should be positive. Firestone’s “editor’s note” after every poem he published didn’t vary: “If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. –FF.” In my time with Verse-Virtual I have received more feedback on my poems here than anything I’ve published elsewhere over my entire “career.” Again, I doubt that I’m alone in this. Which, come to think of it, was the whole point: we are not alone here. Given that there are approximately eighteen million living American poets, publishing about eighteen gajillion poems every year, this sort of community-building is in my experience fairly rare.
And what about Firestone’s insistence that all comments should be positive? A prohibition on criticism in favor of praise bothers many serious poets, I’ve noticed. Some feel that banning critical responses fosters mediocrity, suggesting a lack of quality standards and even a disrespect for the art. This gatekeeping attitude is especially common, of course, in the academic world. Again I think of the late Don Sheehan, and especially the Poetic License column I wrote on the theme of poetic community (November 2016: https://tinyurl.com/yav2ckot). That column spells out my views in more detail, but I would like to re-quote a couple things here. At the start of every conference and workshop Don advised participants to try to find something to love, to truly love, in at least one other poet’s work. Here again is an excerpt from a talk I heard him give a number of times:
To those who were bothered by such an accepting attitude, who might fear that his approach did constitute a vapid “being nice,” I remember Don insisting that “we are all helplessly intelligent. Choose sympathy, and the intelligence will follow.” If you enter into the spirit of such a community, “then your own art mysteriously gets better.” Honestly, I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but I find it a wonderfully empowering and liberating remark. I also don’t know if can claim that my own art is better for my membership in this community (it’s a mystery)—but I can testify that it feels healthier, more balanced and grounded thereby. No, I can’t prove it, but Firestone Feinberg suggests to me that Don Sheehan was right: choose sympathy, and the intelligence will follow. If, on the other hand, you start with the negative, exercising your critical intelligence at its fiercest, you may well never arrive at sympathy. Lord knows I’ve seen it happen.
One of the last personal communications I had with Firestone, before he got too ill to continue editing, was a thank you note he sent after I had mailed him a copy of Tom Montag’s and my anthology, Local News: Poetry About Small Towns. I had mentioned to him that I first “met” a number of its contributors in the virtual pages of Verse-Virtual (and for that matter, Tom is a fellow Contributing Editor, of course).
He wrote back immediately, as usual. I’d like to end by quoting what he said:
He didn’t write “my” journal or “my” Village. He wrote “our.” And so it is, even though he’s left us. May we honor his memory by our continued togetherness.
One regret is that I never met Firestone in person. But in the five and a half years that I knew him via email and the internet, I came to admire him greatly. And in our frequent emails (how did he keep up with all his correspondence?) I got enough of a glimpse of Firestone-the-man (as opposed to Firestone-the-editor) to feel some jealousy for those who did know him more closely. He was unfailingly kind and solicitous. In July of last year, for instance, he wrote to ask me to re-send my monthly submission, for he had misplaced it. I was traveling at the time and did not reply that same day. So this provoked a worried email: “I hope you’re okay. Usually you get right back to me. I don’t know if I should worry.” That email concluded: “I better hear back from you or then I'll officially start worrying.” By the time I replied (the next day) to assure him I was fine, he had of course located the lost submission, but it was clear he cared more about my wellbeing.
My first contact with Firestone was, as I suspect was true for many of us in the early days of Verse-Virtual, a snappy little email asking if I would contribute something to his new journal. I had no idea who he was (is anyone actually named “Firestone”?) or how he had heard of me. Somehow he’d spotted what he called a “spectacular poem” I’d published in The Cortland Review no less than seventeen years prior, and wanted to know if he could re-publish it. I believe I asked how he had heard of me, and how he had run across a rather old poem that I’d never collected in a book.
Of course I had never heard of Verse-Virtual. After some quick Googling, I was able to mention being a friend of Karla Huston, whom he had recently published. He didn’t reply to that comment, and as it happened never did directly answer my questions about how he had discovered me.
But the next day another email arrived, which I still have in my files. He wrote, “Yesterday I didn't see your note about Karla — she's spectacular. I 'found' her like I 'found' you. I know how to pick 'em, what?” And that was that. Without further ado, I was welcomed into this unusual online community of poets that he was building.
From the start I knew I was not dealing with your average literary editor. Everything about our initial exchange was, I soon learned, typical. It wasn’t remotely “professional.” Nothing stuffy or impersonal, ever, from Fire. Always a dash of humor. A bit of absentmindedness and haste. And he cut to the chase: I seldom received a note that was longer than a few lines. But I sure did get a lot of those. And that bubbling ever-present enthusiasm and legendary kindness: of course both Karla Huston and I were deemed “spectacular.” I’ll bet many of you reading this column have received similar praise. (For the record, Karla really is spectacular.)
Though he was definitely a cheerleader for poetry and poets, I quickly observed that he didn’t lack strong opinions. Yes, he was generous and kind to a fault, but he had a firm vision for the sort of journal and community he wanted to see, and he wasn’t shy about communicating that fact, or turning aside from whatever he didn’t view as furthering his vision. I learned also that his taste, which was remarkably free-ranging, was not really negotiable. He seemed to either love or hate a poem. I never did manage to convince him, for example, of the value of haiku and other Asian forms.
He re-published that old poem of mine in the March 2015 issue, and I have happily appeared in every issue since. I told friends that I had found my dream editor, someone who liked a poem or two in every batch I submitted. . . . At some point Firestone formalized the arrangement by making me one of his Contributing Editors, responsible for submitting something every month, along with various duties aimed at encouraging participation in the community he wanted. I moderate the Facebook group V-V Talk, for example. And his charming indifference to the usual professional formalities continued. After he got to know and trust me a bit, sometimes he didn’t even read my contributions before sending me proofs to correct—often right before the issue went live. Then I’d get a note saying something like “Finally had the chance to read your poems—they’re great as usual.” As I say, a poet’s dream editor. . . . But in truth I had found a dream editor in a deeper sense, about which I’ll say more in a little bit.
About a year after our first exchange, with retirement looming, I was looking for a good writing project to take into my post-teaching life. So I wrote Fire to propose doing an occasional column on poetry for Verse-Virtual, whenever the mood struck me, and wondered if he’d be interested. I sent him some links to essays I’d published elsewhere as samples. His response was almost immediate. Good idea, he thought, but it had to be monthly, not occasional. Not even every other month would do. (Forgive me, Firestone, but as soon as you had to step down from editing, alternate months is exactly what I began doing!)
He also felt the samples I sent were way too long. No one wanted to read long prose in a poetry magazine, he announced. Would I be interested, he inquired, in writing “MUCH shorter columns, e.g., three to five paragraphs?” I almost said no, not wanting to commit to a monthly obligation; and not seeing how such abbreviated essays would satisfy or allow me to say anything significant.
In any case, I duly wrote up a short and breezy sample column for him to look at, and he loved it. We were in business. My idea for an overall column title was to borrow the one Virginia Woolf used for her 1925 book of essays, The Common Reader. True confession: I had used that title before, about forty years ago, on a weekly newspaper column I wrote for a small newspaper in Massachusetts. At that point in my life I was newly released from graduate school, and seeking a project to occupy me before beginning my teaching career. I loved then and still love the idea of writing not just for other academics but for any interested readers.
Firestone’s reply to my “Common Reader” sample column is worth quoting, for it gives a real flavor of his personality as editor, encouraging and informal, but always firm about his wishes:
The article is excellent. Its length is perfect. The overall title is terrible.
Forget about Woolf. Too esoteric and, regardless, you are not addressing "the common reader." You are writing to and for a community of poets who are your friends.
I want a simple overall title that includes your name if possible and has a friendly cast to it, if possible. Here are some examples off the top of my head. (These aren't even suggestions. They are just impromptu ideas. We will figure out a title that works for both of us and V-V.)
David Graham's View
David Graham Talks
David Graham Says
David Graham ON POETRY
DG on Poetry, Poems, and Poets
On Poetry, Poems, and Poets by DG
About Poetry... by DG
A Poetic Life by DG
POETRY WORLD
A POET'S LIFE
A LIFE OF POETRY
Poetic License
Talking about Poetry by DG
TALK ABOUT POETRy
I don't want stiffness or formality if we can get away from it. Something clever or light-hearted could be good.
Try thinking along these lines.
Time for me to go to sleep.
'night, --F
That may be the longest email I ever received from him. “I don’t want stiffness or formality” could be Firestone’s motto. Anyway, I gratefully adopted one of his suggestions (“Poetic License”) for my project, and so we were off and running. The initial column appeared in June of 2016. At first I respected Fire’s desire for extreme brevity, but once I had shown him that I could write the kind of prose that he wanted, I did gradually begin allowing myself longer word counts. We never discussed it, but my tightly edited three or four pages sometimes stretched to six or even longer. And he never once complained about their length. By then we were friends, and he made me feel I was a valuable part of this village of poets, as he liked to call it, that he had founded. I gather he made everyone involved feel the same way.
It’s hard to talk about community, I find, without sounding vaporous and sappy. I think this is true, in part, because for too many groups it’s in large part a feel-good abstraction, not an active practice. Every institution, it seems, wants to think of itself in such terms, even the most cold-blooded commercial enterprises. That is why some businesses like to call their (low) wage-earning employees “partners” or “associates”; why K-Mart would employ people called “greeters”; and why every college’s catalog, even the most impersonal research university’s, will invariably include in its mission statement high-minded talk about matters of community.
As we all know, announcing community is easy, but building one is hard. Maintaining it over the long haul is even harder. Real community is like pornography in the old definition: it may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it. Or, I should probably say, when you feel it. For there is a mystery involved. True community cannot simply be announced or willed into being. In an earlier column I wrote about the late Don Sheehan, who for a quarter century nurtured another remarkable poetry community at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. A few parallels between Firestone and Don Sheehan seem notable. One is their insistence on an egalitarian atmosphere. Readings and workshops at The Frost Place regularly included some of the country’s most renowned poets (Charles Simic and Ellen Bryant Voigt, for just two examples); but any who put on airs or acted like big stars were simply not asked back. The atmosphere was strictly informal and welcoming to all. As Sheehan often noted in his introductory remarks to student participants, the annual Frost Conference was a place to study and celebrate poetry, not to advance one’s career or even conduct networking. Unlike at some poetry conferences, the only star was poetry itself.
Another parallel has to do with that vexed matter of literary standards. As Firestone once pointed out to me, Verse-Virtual did not aim to be highly selective, publishing only “the best”; rather, he wanted to present the widest range of poetic voices so long as they were speaking honestly and from the heart. Thus the virtual pages of his journal have included many authors with national reputations and numerous books to their name. It has featured state Poets Laureate such as Marilyn Taylor, Karla Huston, Sydney Lea, and the late Dick Allen. But also high school students who’d never been published before. Academic poets like myself could mingle freely with occasional and non-professional poets who had something to say. The only thing we needed to have in common was a love of poetry. Matters of reputation meant little to Firestone. He was fierce in wanting our contributors’ notes, for instance, not to sound like bragging or academic résumés.
When I think about it, I’m struck by the fact that Firestone welcomed me into the group so freely, given my academic habits and credentials. His antipathy toward anything stuffy or unduly esoteric was likely grounded in unpleasant experience, I imagine. At our worst we academics can certainly be a forbidding and judgmental lot. Too often we make such a fetish of “excellence” and “high standards” that we forget to be kind and humble, mistakes that Fire never made. Did he sometimes include work that wouldn’t meet the professional standards of some blue-chip journals? Sure. I believe he would have been the first to admit it. For that matter, every poet I know has more than occasionally looked through some issue of one of those blue-chip journals, halted at this poem or that, and wondered what on earth were the editors thinking?
Obviously taste is both fickle and variable. There’s no accounting for taste, we all agree: De gustibus non est disputandum, the Latin maxim has advised us for centuries, and in age after age poets, critics, and editors have nodded, while going right on assuming that their own personal taste was infallible. I have no particular beef with those who profess to be upholding high standards, though things get a little murky when you try to define them. In any event, the deeper, more significant truth is that there are other ways of measuring success—fellowship, kindness, curiosity, open-mindedness, egalitarianism. I can almost hear Firestone saying something like, “This isn’t a contest or a race. We’re a community of friends.” Connection and friendship trumped literary connoisseurship.
A related matter would be Firestone’s unwavering insistence that not only should readers and contributors communicate with each other, but that any interaction should be positive. Firestone’s “editor’s note” after every poem he published didn’t vary: “If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. –FF.” In my time with Verse-Virtual I have received more feedback on my poems here than anything I’ve published elsewhere over my entire “career.” Again, I doubt that I’m alone in this. Which, come to think of it, was the whole point: we are not alone here. Given that there are approximately eighteen million living American poets, publishing about eighteen gajillion poems every year, this sort of community-building is in my experience fairly rare.
And what about Firestone’s insistence that all comments should be positive? A prohibition on criticism in favor of praise bothers many serious poets, I’ve noticed. Some feel that banning critical responses fosters mediocrity, suggesting a lack of quality standards and even a disrespect for the art. This gatekeeping attitude is especially common, of course, in the academic world. Again I think of the late Don Sheehan, and especially the Poetic License column I wrote on the theme of poetic community (November 2016: https://tinyurl.com/yav2ckot). That column spells out my views in more detail, but I would like to re-quote a couple things here. At the start of every conference and workshop Don advised participants to try to find something to love, to truly love, in at least one other poet’s work. Here again is an excerpt from a talk I heard him give a number of times:
This taking-care, which is a form of love, increases the quality of the intelligence. If you must make a flash choice between sympathy and intelligence, choose sympathy.
Usually these fall apart—sympathy becoming a mindless 'being nice' to everyone, while intelligence becomes an exercise in contempt. But here's the great fact of this Festival,
for twenty-seven years now: as you come deliberately to care about another person's art (and not your own), then your own art mysteriously gets better.
To those who were bothered by such an accepting attitude, who might fear that his approach did constitute a vapid “being nice,” I remember Don insisting that “we are all helplessly intelligent. Choose sympathy, and the intelligence will follow.” If you enter into the spirit of such a community, “then your own art mysteriously gets better.” Honestly, I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but I find it a wonderfully empowering and liberating remark. I also don’t know if can claim that my own art is better for my membership in this community (it’s a mystery)—but I can testify that it feels healthier, more balanced and grounded thereby. No, I can’t prove it, but Firestone Feinberg suggests to me that Don Sheehan was right: choose sympathy, and the intelligence will follow. If, on the other hand, you start with the negative, exercising your critical intelligence at its fiercest, you may well never arrive at sympathy. Lord knows I’ve seen it happen.
One of the last personal communications I had with Firestone, before he got too ill to continue editing, was a thank you note he sent after I had mailed him a copy of Tom Montag’s and my anthology, Local News: Poetry About Small Towns. I had mentioned to him that I first “met” a number of its contributors in the virtual pages of Verse-Virtual (and for that matter, Tom is a fellow Contributing Editor, of course).
He wrote back immediately, as usual. I’d like to end by quoting what he said:
Thank you so much for telling me about the connections between V-V and your book. I am very happy to know that our Village is verdant, vibrant, and verbal. It's wonderful
to the development of V-V as a community. Somehow your book is a great sign of our togetherness.
He didn’t write “my” journal or “my” Village. He wrote “our.” And so it is, even though he’s left us. May we honor his memory by our continued togetherness.
© 2020 David Graham
Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this article please tell David.
His email address is grahamd@ripon.edu. Letting authors know you like their work is the beginning of
community at Verse-Virtual.