The dedication, continued: Barney Childs

I've studied poetry-writing formally under four teachers, not counting junior high and high school creative writing. The first of the four, the composer Barney Childs, taught poetry-writing and poetics at Johnston College when I went there between 1975 and 1977. I was commended to Barney's poetry seminar even before I started at Johnston, when I visited as a college senior and told people I talked to that I wrote poetry/wanted to be a poet. Barney's classes were described to me as "rigorous" and in terms that made them sound like poetics boot camp. I guess Barney's gruff persona readily amplified into the drill sergeant required by the latter metaphor.

The poetry I wrote in Barney's classes wasn't much better than what I wrote outside of class, but I did pay more attention to forms like the sestina and sonnet because of his assignments, and perhaps I did take on a sense of standards, of the need for work to be good enough to "stand" on its own. I remember that Barney was an admirer of the poet Paul Blackburn, the purity of his practice and the combination of openness and formalism evidenced in his work.

I've been writing irregularly about my two years at Johnston, under the heading "Garden of Earthly Delights," on my main blog. More may be found there about those rarefied environs and times long gone...