The picture was taken in 1970, when she would have been around twenty-five. It was a color photograph on a bright day, and she sat on a rock at the edge of an ocean, it seemed. Her hair was a surprising coppery brown, and the wind blew it in streamers around her face. She wore jeans and a red shirt, and her feet were bare. Her face was both the same and yet different, not so wide open as it was now, but unlined, and with an expression that seemed, in my imagining, to be looking from that past into this present moment, as if she saw straight into the life she would lead and was curious about it.

I found an interview she gave to a literary magazine. I was only now realizing there were such things as literary magazines. But I was glad I found it because the interviewer was just as clueless as I was:

Interviewer: How old were you when you decided to be a poet?

V.: I don’t think it’s anything you decide. You write poems because you want to take hold of an aspect of experience and examine it, push it a little further, find out why it speaks to you. You want to speak back at it. I don’t know when the world starts calling you a poet. It’s a frightening moment when you call yourself one, when you have to take yourself seriously. To answer your question, I suppose I was in my early twenties. Which is awfully young, but if I’d been much older, I might have talked myself out of it.

It requires a certain amount of foolhardiness to launch yourself at the world that way.

Foolhardy, interesting word. The fool has the quality of hardiness.

Interviewer: Does it bother you that so few people read poetry nowadays?

V.: It will bother me when I am no longer around to write it.

Interviewer: You chose a life devoted to art, to poetry, not an easy or a conventional life. Do you have any regrets?

V.: I have countless regrets. But none of them have anything to do with poetry.

Oscar Brasco was a lot easier to find online. Strangest thing: he wasn’t exactly the national poet laureate, but he had his share of lauds and honors. Being a poet seemed like it was a kind of secret identity, like Peter Parker ducking out of high school to put on his Spiderman costume.

A biographical note said that Oscar was of Portugese-Jewish heritage, and that his poems “brought a certain playfulness to established poetic forms.” I didn’t know about any of that. But I was able to puzzle through one of them that began this way:

Old blue moon

over and over

old boo hoo

another sad night

like the lid of a box coming down.

like blue smoke in a curl

like a glass bead at the bottom of a pocket