I remember many times sitting beside him at that window— he would insist that I take his more comfortable chair, and sometimes I would. One summer evening as the sun was setting we were there talking about William Carlos Williams & Rexroth’s translations from the Chinese, when a towboat came up the river, its sound preceding it. The foliage gave one barge and took it back and returned two, until I was wishing I’d counted, and then there the whole rig was with its running lights: sand barges on their slow, flat push upstream to Frankfort. Without comment Wendell handed me the binoculars so that I could see what was going on in the pilot’s cabin of the caboose towboat, a forward-facing man at the wheel, and another at a side window—much as these poems hand you access to what’s in the author’s deepest mind & most eloquent language. I was poised between wanting to say what I thought the boatman was called to the window to witness—the last sun sliding across the flat white face of the hillside Berry house—and not wanting to break the silence. The encompassing spirit of this suite of poems is thus poised, under equal influence from art and nature—it’s in that straddle they find their tension, and their terms. The tall house up the road, caught in time, is the centerpiece of their landscape, and the river, with it’s deep dark power & ongoingness, is the trope of their vision.

From the legal pad he typed them there at the Camp on an office model Royal, out from under its cover, using 20pd Corrasable bond and making a carbon on yellow seconds or onionskin (this was a long time before copy machines) which he sent to me—in the margins I noted my responses, and sent them back. Or kept them because I didn’t want to part with them, and wrote a fan letter. I loved these poems when I first read them, and found them thrilling, and inspiring—he was so far out ahead of the rest of us—already he knew what he had to write about and who he wanted to be and what he wanted to sound like—already he was becoming very accomplished, one good book after another. And I still love them, for the load-bearing freedom they manifest, flying out of the gravities they debate and flying back in, the simultaneous grace and momentousness of their moves transforming their lashings-out and their propositions into notes of a song. Of all Wendell’s poetry, I think I like best the work he did during that period, mid-sixties through early seventies, the first four or five books, when he was still feeling his way, earning each step, testing himself.