Confession
DeWitt
2006
I told W. D. Snodgrass that his book, Heart’s Needle, was the first poetry book I had ever bought. I was a student at Indiana-Purdue University in Fort Wayne in Robert Novak’s class in the spring of 1976. I confessed I read “April Inventory” every April since then. We did a reading together at Le Moyne College. It was the first time I had been back to Syracuse after I left the university there in 1996. He had taught at Syracuse too, for ten years, 1958-68, at a time when English Departments still had classes in rhetoric, speech, and debate. I read first in what was now the standard singsong, voice rising as it nears the end of a line. It was strange and miraculous the way Snodgrass read, an old-fashioned platform speech, delivered stressing the beats, pounding the accents as he scanned with a booming voice, feet stamping. It was stunning to hear poetry delivered that way. I thought of an old scratchy record I heard once of Vachel Lindsay performing, not quite singing singing, a proto-rap. It was exhausting and Snodgrass, at the end, was exhausted.