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Rhymes with Deer ciaran berry We were about three poems into the semester, and I wanted to see what the great man had written on my latest effort. I thought his words would provide me with some insight, tell me something I needed to know as an apprentice poet, and as someone more or less new to the concept of workshops. I was in need of a guru, a hairy shaman who would point me down the absolute path to poetic certainty. This was in the graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, which at the time was still housed at 19 University Place just off Washington Square Park. We met around an oval table in the student lounge on Wednesday evenings. I sat to Phil’s left, beside Ryan Black and directly across the table from Sarah Heller. I’d been in the country about four years, and much about the United States was still strange to me. My undergraduate experience of the creative writing workshop had involved a single class with the young Northern Irish novelist Robert McLiam Wilson at the University of Ulster. We sat in Robert’s office in a cloud of cigarette smoke talking about our god-awful poems and stories; or cricket, or politics, or our teacher’s handsomeness (he looked like a literary Pierce Brosnan, he said so himself). Once, he wrote “DE HEANEY IT!” in red pen across a poem of mine that involved someone drowning in a peat bog. He also suggested that, as an exercise, we write about either giving or receiving fellatio. Much 6 later, having moved to New York City with my new wife, I took a couple of classes at the 92nd Street Y. These were mostly full of retired doctors and lawyers who assumed that their successful professional lives assured their success in poetry, which of course turned out not to be the case. So this was a relatively new thing then—my first workshop as a poetry student at NYU with the reputably fierce and fickle, not to mention wickedly funny, Phil Levine. True to his reputation, he’d upset a couple of girls on the first night we gathered. One was writing poems in the voices of buried-alive Victorians; the other believed that punctuation was just a convention. So, too, is language, Phil pointed out. In that first discussion, he kept my poem for last. I assumed, therefore, that it was terrible, but he was reasonably kind when it finally rose to the top of the pile. My poem was more American than the poems of all the Americans in the class, he said. Parts of it reminded him of Whitman, parts of it of Crane. I took the train back to Queens knowing I needed to reread both poets, just as I often left Phil’s class thinking about what I hadn’t read well enough or at all. Dylan Thomas. Edward Thomas. Antonio Machado. Wallace Stevens. Miguel Hernández. Galway Kinnell, who Phil always said was the greatest poet of their generation. But we were three weeks into the class now, and I really wanted to know what more deeply, if anything, he thought of my work. I was still too chicken to go to office hours. Even though he wasn’t in our workshop, Adam Day from Louisville had practically moved into Phil’s office by then. You’d walk past and there Adam would be, feet stretched out, hands cupped behind his head, like Phil was his bookie or favorite uncle, as they went through a poem or talked about Larry Levis, Phil’s former student, and the poet, along with Phil himself, whom most of us wanted to be. I envied Adam his ease; I was still too much in awe. I’d tiptoe past the door hoping the maestro wouldn’t notice me and call me in: “Hey, it’s our Irish guy. Irish guy, have you met Kentucky?” Halfway through our three-hour weekly session, we’d take a little break. Phil would saunter down to the bathroom in his white tennis shoes. Star student Matt Donovan would slip down to the street to buy a quick bit of supper. Usually, he brought back a slice of pizza, which he was adept at folding in two so he could eat and walk at the same time in that way one masters only after many years in New York City. One night he brought back sushi...

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