A Friend Remembered

This morning, Kristin and I were discussing self-reflective writing and the idea of drafts, and I remembered something that Donald Sheehan, my poetry professor from Dartmouth, had passed on to us from a conversation with the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Honey, it's all draft 'til you die." Variations on this quote appear here and there in the wide digital world.

I tried to search my computer for the original reference to that quote and failed, so I searched for it online, and in the course of my wanderings, I learned that Professor Sheehan had died. He and I hadn't spoken in a couple of years, though he did write a recommendation for me when I applied to Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English in 2005, and he helped me get the credit for his Dartmouth class transferred to Middlebury soon after that.

I wrote the best poetry of my life for his seminar in 2003, and I still feel a deep, deep gratitude for having known him and his generosity of spirit. In reading some tributes written by his friends, I came across his opening statement for the Frost Festival Workshop at The Frost Place, which he served for decades:

The heart of the conference is the workshop. Thus, you will need to work from the heart. There is a natural urge to hide: a swarm of anxieties, both our own and others' that we pick up on. Above all, there is an overwhelming 'need'—a false hunger—to be praised, coupled with a hair-trigger impulse to envy anyone else whose work seems immediately praiseworthy. Thus you are likely to find yourself whipsawed between the hunger to be admired and the impulse to envy those who are admirable.

You will need to recognize and acknowledge all of this—in order to reach the key that unlocks all truth: taking very great and very deliberate care with each other.

This taking-care, which is a form of love, increases the quality of the intelligence. If you must make a flash choice between sympathy and intelligence, choose sympathy. Usually these fall apart—sympathy becoming a mindless 'being nice' to everyone, while intelligence becomes an exercise in contempt. But here's the great fact of this Festival, for twenty-seven years now: as you come deliberately to care about another person's art (and not your own), then your own art mysteriously gets better.

Thus, your work at this conference is to make the art of at least one other person better and stronger by giving—in love—all your art to them.

That was the philosophy that defined his poetry seminar, and it continues to inform my teaching, though I have little idea how to imitate the calm gentleness of Professor Sheehan's spirit. I love the idea that by investing in the work of others, we become better ourselves. There's a poetic rightness to the idea that we receive through our giving. I'll take some liberty here and say that I don't believe he was mystified that we got better by examining each other's work, but rather that it is one of the beautiful mysteries of life that by giving away love, caring, and truly deliberate attention to others, we somehow find more of these things in ourselves.

I think he would have appreciated that his care towards me continues to multiply outwards, and while I do plan to reinvigorate my students' workshops with these thoughts, for right now I think I'll just miss him and remember him for a few minutes.