At The Top of his Game

Protocol requires that I come clean about my relationship with Floyd Skloot. In 1969 I taught a verse-writing workshop at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Floyd was one of my students, and he gives his version of events in a chapter of his memoir entitled, “The Top Shelf”: “This was his first writing class as a teacher and my only writing class as a student. Pinsker was twenty-seven, fresh from being saturated in exactly the sort of poetry I most needed to know about, as enthusiastic about conveying a love and commitment to poetry as about teaching craft. It was the perfect moment for me to receive such instruction.”

Franklin and Marshall College, then and now, is an institution that takes liberal learning seriously. My verse-writing workshop was not designed as a vocational course for those interested in becoming professional poets. Instead the doors were wide open to upperclassmen (Franklin and Marshall was at that time an all-male college) willing to read and discuss a generous handful of contemporary poets as well as examples from such hardy perennials as Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, Auden, and Eliot; willing to do exercises in form and craft; and perhaps, most important of all, willing to share their own poetry and criticize the poems of their classmates.

What most students got from the course was a greater appreciation of poetry—both from reading selections of our best contemporary American poets and from seeing how things worked (or didn’t work) in their own poems. Floyd (I can’t make the reviewer in me call him Skloot) was the exception; it was clear that he wanted—desperately, I thought at the time—to become a professional writer and he was willing to work at it.

After graduation Floyd attended Southern Illinois University, where he studied with Thomas Kinsella. After earning his mfa, Floyd took a job (improbably enough) working in the Illinois state-budget office. Floyd would send me a half-dozen new poems and then, after a week or so went by, he’d call me for two things: one, to discuss the latest hardback books of poetry he’d bought on business trips to Chicago, and two, to discuss, line by line, his new poems. These calls were long and expensive. When I asked him about this, Floyd said not to worry: he was calling from work—on the state’s dime.

Reassured that Floyd was not going to go broke owing the phone company, I immediately came up with another worry—I had nothing to say about the new books Floyd so avidly collected (before dinner he usually had a stiff drink and made his way through one volume of poetry), because I couldn’t lay out $500 at a pop (as Floyd did) for a bundle of new hardback poetry books. My usual practice was to buy the best of the bunch when they came out in paperback editions.

The easy part was talking about Floyd’s poems, which were getting stronger and stronger. Many magazine editors agreed. At this point allow me to explore a thesis that will tie Skloot from his pre-1988 days, when he was a marathoner in tip-top shape, with the days after 1988, when he suffered from what some doctors thought was an extended bout of chronic-fatigue syndrome and what later turned out to be an attack of a virus to the brain. To drag Shakespeare into the discussion, his is a case of readiness being all. It is partly true that his assorted illnesses made Floyd the writer he is; but it is also true that Floyd had prepared, without realizing it, to face his challenges in lines of poetry and paragraphs of prose. He was ready for whatever happened—and happen it did. I would argue that his liberal-arts education and his wide extra-curricular reading gave him the firm intellectual scaffolding he needed.

Floyd’s eighteen books are nearly equally divided among collections of poetry...