2. Sailor Librarian: San Diego 

At 17, I graduated from high school, gave up my job

as soda jerk and joined the U.S. Navy.  The Korean War

was underway; my mother had died, and Chicago seemed

an oppressive place to be.

         My thanks to the U.S. Navy.  They taught me how

to type (60 words a minute), organize an office, and

serve as a librarian.  In 1952 I served in Korea aboard a

300-foot long, flat-bottomed Landing Ship Tank (LST).

A Yeoman 3rd Class, I became overseer of 1200

paperback books, a sturdy upright typewriter, and a

couple of filing cabinets.

         The best thing about duty on an LST is the ship's

speed: 8-10 knots.  It takes approximately one month

for an LST to sail between San Diego and Pusan, Korea.

In that month I read Melville's Moby Dick,

Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Thoreau's Walden,

Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales, the King James Version

of the Bible, Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and a

biography of Abraham Lincoln.

         While at sea, I began writing poetry as if poems,

to paraphrase Thoreau, were secret letters from

some distant land.

         I sent one poem to a girl named Lorelei with whom

I was in love.  Lorelei had a job at the Dairy Queen.

Shortly before enlisting in the Navy, I spent $15 of

my soda jerk money taking her up in a single engine,

sight-seeing airplane so we could kiss and--at the

same time--get a good look at Chicago from the air.

Beautiful Loreli never responded to my poem.  Years

later, at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop,

I learned that much of what I had been writing (love

poems inspired by a combination of lust and

loneliness) belonged, loosely speaking, to a

tradition--the venerable tradition of unrequited love.

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[excerpted from Foreword to the book FOUR INCARNATIONS and reprinted

in NEW & SELECTED POEMS, Red Hen Press.]