Letter to a Good Guy

Letter To My High School English Teacher

Roger,
What to say. Thank you for awakening a 15 year old to poetry. Your easy explanation of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” probably saved me from a life of brutal criminal behavior. (Well, that might be an exaggeration.) That one or two years there at UHS were wonderful. Barbara Baum gave me Sherwood Anderson and you provided Dylan Thomas. 
I hope you find the book fun. I really enjoy the research part of these creations and just felt it would be fun to add the bibliography to the novel. 
I’ve just gotten your last two books in the mail and am looking forward to sitting out at my lunch spot in the sun and taking them in. I’m about a third into W.S. Merwin’s “Summer Doorways” – if you’ve not read it, its great fun.
There’s a CD enclosed. I put up a site of my poetry because nobody wanted them, and had pretty much stopped trying. With the discovery of music, I’ve found a new use of what I wanted my poetry to be. I knew I was writing measured (and in theory, lyrical poetry) but its just not the style this generation, but I discovered that most everything I did write as poetry lends itself to the song form.
I add a chorus and do a little editing and I have a song. All of the ones that didn’t quite work, suddenly work. People applaud. I’ve gotten compliments on the songs that were ignored as poems or never quite worked as poems.
I’m also highly unskilled as a musician, so I’ve got a lot to learn in the next few years.
I still feel like that 15 year old kid, I hope you don’t mind.
I’ve spent an entire life, in love with the unwashed. Anderson in prose, (and in poetry, but few will admit to reading him as a poet)- There are an incredible number of unwashed geniuses- Woody Guthrie, The Carter Family Dad, Steinbeck and Dreiser in the beginning. That was what Whitman was.
I hope to be back in that area in the next few years one way or another. My youngest one is applying to IU for her Masters, but we shall see -there are options. My Helena Gilder project will bring me back because all of her papers are at the Lilly Library. I’ve had visions of my first retirement summer, parked in a RV at Lake Monroe, tooling into the library to leaf through papers and (now, sitting at the camp fire at night picking away at the banjo) May we all live so long. I hope to find you there if I make it.

Your fan,
Dan