It isn’t long before the poet calls, and invites me to come down to the university to meet him. I go as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, not feeling much in the way of trepidation, mostly curious. His name is Richard Shelton, and we meet at the Poetry Center, which is an old pinkish adobe near Speedway, surrounded by oleanders, a treasure house of books and tapes and magazines. Dick is probably forty, with curly red hair and a beard of reddish gold. He looks like a figure sketched on a vase by Picasso: there’s a bit of the satyr about him, or the centaur. He’s wearing leather sandals like mine and leaning back in a desk chair in a room papered with posters advertising poetry readings, and beautifully printed copies of poems signed by their authors in bold or tiny hands. He’s completely personable and yet there’s some element of the mysterious about him, too, as if some deep reserve of experience or knowledge were not quite available; the depths of him inform his surface but remain depths.

He wants to know where these odd and dreamy poems have come from, and he wants, plainly, to be of use. He doesn’t criticize the poems much, offering an exclamation of encouragement here, a suggestion about word choice or phrasing there. He says I can use the Poetry Center’s library any time; you can’t check things out but it’s open every day and has comfortable chairs for reading, and a universe of books, many of them extraordinary—letterpress volumes, hand-printed and hand-painted things, wildly exotic magazines printed in Florence or in Venice or sewn together by hand in the basements of Sausalito. Books of Kenneth Patchen’s poems with covers the poet painted himself. He suggests things I should read, poets he thinks I might like who I’d never find on my own; many of them are the touchstone poets of his generation, people I’m reading to this day: Merwin, Simic, Kinnell. I’m shy and hugely grateful. He invites me to come back next month with more poems.

In retrospect I can hardly believe my luck; out of the blue, exactly the teacher I needed has appeared, and he has the generosity to take time for a fifteen-year-old’s groping poems and the wisdom to give me just enough, hold out some possibilities, and then stand out of the way. He doesn’t try to shape what I do, merely points me toward what’s possible.