In Memoriam: Leonard Nathan, 1924–2007

In the early 1970s, I wrote a brief spontaneous note to the poet Leonard Nathan, of whom I then knew nothing other than that I had seen and admired his poem "Sorry," which had appeared in a current issue of, as I recall, The New Republic. I can no longer remember, but I suppose I mailed the note to the magazine with the hope that someone would forward it. Within a short time I was delighted to receive a warm response from Leonard, and thus was launched a friendship of almost forty years, affirmed in hundreds if not thousands of pages of correspondence. We exchanged news of our families, news of our writing, and as the years passed, news of our health, in the manner of friends growing older. And, of course, we exchanged hundreds of poems in early drafts for whose success we had high hopes. And, of course, news of the disappointments that, for all of us who write, fall in behind high hopes.

In the past few years I have been much blessed by literary success, and there is no way I could overstate how much of that success I owe to Leonard's wise and generous counsel. I don't suppose there is a single poem in any of the books I've published since we met that doesn't show the genius of his helping hand. When he studied a poem he weighed not only the total effect but the use of every word, of every line break and punctuation mark. As the years passed I began to call him Uncle Leonard, to acknowledge how much I loved him, and how junior I felt to his superior intellect and mastery of poetry. He called me Nephew, and I was proud of that. I will go to my grave not knowing half of what he knew about literature, about writing, and about life. And I will never have another correspondent whose help with my poems will be even half so valuable as his. I was immensely lucky to have come upon that poem, "Sorry," so many years ago and that I had the sense to write a thank you note to him for giving it to all of us.

There is an enormous amount of poetry being published these days, so much that none of us can stand back far enough to see the few poems that may endure. But I have faith that the years will sort it out, and in another century I'm certain that Leonard's marvelous poems, some of which appeared in the pages of Prairie Schooner, will glow like gems among the rubble. He was among the best and most intelligent writers of our age, and, more importantly, among the finest souls that we have been blessed to live our lives among.