April 3, 2013
Wednesday

Without you I’d be an unleafed tree
Blasted in a bleakness with no Spring.

Your love is the weather of my being.
— Daniel Hoffman, 1923-2013
American poet

So — the plan was to read one poem a day from stack of archived Poetry magazines and write about what came of the exercise. But on the third day, already I am deviating from that plan.

Every morning I receive the Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets in my inbox. When I saw Daniel Hoffman’s name in the subject line, I clicked the message open. There he was, much as I remembered him, only with forty years on his craggy face and a lot less hair. He died four days ago. He would have turned 90 today.

Forty years ago, give or take a few months or so, Daniel Hoffman gave a presentation in my classroom, the one in A-wing with a connecting door to the principal’s office and a view of a newly-planted tree. Its installation had consumed two class periods of observation. “Write about trees,” I told my students. I’m still doing that. I wonder if any of the others are.

Daniel Hoffman talked about poetry that day, about Edgar Allen Poe. His critical study, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, had been published not long before. He read a poem he’d written about the poet. Its last line was the repetition of Poe’s name seven times, as in the book’s title. Each uttering of the name was louder, and by the sixth or seventh one, Hoffman was on his feet, nearly shouting. Looking back, I can say that this was probably my first exposure to poetry as performance art.

Although I remember Hoffman’s visit, I cannot remember the auspices under which it was arranged. Nor can a colleague, who does not even remember the visit. She taught British literature. Another teacher, who was also the department chairman, and I taught American, and I suspect it was that other teacher, who arranged the presentation, likely under the Poets-in-the-Schools program.

I was twenty-five years old then, and the school year of 1972-1973 was not one of the best years of my life, neither professionally nor personally. I was very self-absorbed, sliding into a depression triggered in part by a broken romance. My former boyfriend was another teacher, and the new girlfriend was a staff member, and seeing them every day made for a good deal of sighing and self-pity. I wasn’t reading new poetry, only the tried-and-true canon that I was teaching. I did read Hoffman’s critical study, probably in a library copy, since I don’t have it on my shelf, but not his own work. The memory of his visit, of his physical presence in the room, has remained, recalled every time over the next several decades when the chronological romp through American literature that was my teaching schedule said it was November, time for Edgar Allen Poe.

The poem with which the Academy chose to commemorate Hoffman’s passing is very likely a love letter to his wife, Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman, who died in 2005. Just as I knew little about Hoffman beyond the fact of his stature as a Poe scholar, I didn’t know anything about her until I read Hoffman’s obituary. She had been the poetry editor of the Ladies Home Journal from 1948 until 1962, in an era when women’s magazines published quality poetry and fiction.

I was in ninth grade in 1962. I was writing, as most teen girls do, even the ones who don’t ultimately seek to develop and advance in the craft. I sent some poems to the Ladies’ Home Journal because that was one of the magazines my mother subscribed to. I know that one was about the difficulties of taking a true-false test I hadn’t studied for, and another was about trees or birds, or birds in trees, or something along those lines. I know that I did not include a self-addressed stamped envelope, because I knew as little about the submission process as I did about writing poetry. Nevertheless, on a sunny summer day between ninth grade and tenth grade, I received a personalized rejection letter from LHJ. The writer returned my typed-out poems and included a note thanking me for the opportunity to read my work, saying it wasn’t right for them but to keep on working. It was my first literary rejection. It probably came from Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman.

Poet Stephen Dunn said that “In [Daniel Hoffman’s poems] is a lifetime of careful observance, the voice rarely raised yet passionate in its precisions, the man behind it enough a lover of life to have been properly critical of the way we’ve lived it.”

Daniel Hoffman passed through my life at a time when I was performing those careful observations, but not writing them down. I associate him with a newly-planted tree, itself now gone in the reshaping of the landscape at the high school where I taught. The space where my classroom was, the classroom Daniel Hoffman graced for a moment, is no longer room A-1 in an area known as A-wing. I taught only two years after the remodeling, in a classroom at the far end of the building. I never really learned the numbering scheme of the new school.

Loss and change and the reshaping of our perceptions is pretty much what life is about. At the end of this week, the weather of my being is taking out of my familiar landscape for a week. This morning I looked closely at the trees I contemplate every day. They’re unleafed now, in a spring that has been late in coming. Both they and I will be different when I return.