"After a year of college, I knew I was not going to major in Classics (early class times), Political Science (dry texts), or Philosophy (huh?), so I signed up for a course called Contemporary American Poetry. We met in the afternoon, in a classroom dominated by a wood table that had been worn by age into a dark honey. It was shaped like a pond, a near ellipse, and how it got into the room was unfathomable to me...”