The artist had good use for ordering devices, and the many-paned window provided him with one, a grid with more than two dimensions, a way to measure & to frame anything of his choosing. ‘The window has an edge / that is celestial, / where the eyes are surpassed,’ he sums up at the end of the sequence. What we’ve been witnessing is the transforming power of the presiding image, from random thought &  perception into picture, from time into timelessness. The way these poems move, each within itself, and within the overall—how the flat rock of the voice skips—suggests to me the equal influence of both the grid & the river. How to put this? The other shore is out of reach, but the language aspires there: dramatizing where it settles, commencing its pulsing circles.

He wrote these poems in longhand, probably with a pen, on a long yellow legal pad (made dear to him early on by his lawyer father), sometimes with his feet propped up on the desk and a pencil or a Camel cigarette behind his ear. After breakfast every morning that he wasn’t off teaching or reading or lecturing, he went to the Camp to write, disappearing out the back door and around the side of the house with a brief case and a thermos. Depending on the weather, the stove would be the first order of business, and he would be dressed in coveralls, wearing a stocking cap as he swept the floors, often joyfully. Or the doors would get propped open to the joy of the breeze, and he’d be dressed in khaki work pants & work shirt & wearing Red Wings, a tall thin man, six four, good-looking, with a deep voice & a big laugh & a real mean streak, and an Irish charm that still disarms many who think they aren’t going to like him, the self-appointed Jeremiah from Hicksville. In any portrait of Wendell, there hangs nearby a Cezanne calendar, he loves especially the landscapes, and a Vermeer postcard, maybe a Degas too. Depending on which dog was current, there could be one stretched on the pine floor of the Camp as these poems were being written, but he would be the only possible distraction. The birds coming and going at the window feeder weren’t a distraction from his work, more like the other way around. The level surfaces were well-ordered & sparsely populated, in spirit akin to the book you are holding. To the right of the working counter were deep shelves, with manuscripts, correspondence, journals, tasks, books, and to the right of that, the door onto the porch with its swing, hoisted to the ceiling in off-season.