I was privileged to read several lyrics by Coleridge this past Thursday as part of the University of Mary Washington’s venerable “Thursday Poems” series. The idea is simple: gather on Thursday afternoon to hear someone read thirty minutes worth of poetry. No lectures, minimal commentary, mostly just great verse. My colleague and mentor Bill Kemp (of Kemp Symposium fame) started the series several years ago. For my money, it was a great accomplishment. My colleague (and fellow music- and poetry-lover) Eric Lorentzen has kept the tradition going with panache, and with deep devotion.

Coleridge’s poetry can be difficult to read, and certainly difficult to take in on one listen. I’m not sure how intelligible I make it in my reading here. I gave it my best shot, aiming for a climax with “Kubla Khan,” one of my favorite lyric poems, and then a graceful close with the beautiful “Frost At Midnight,” also a favorite of long standing.

I got through “Kubla Khan,” only a little disappointed by the fact that my timing was off and I didn’t have the minutes I needed to read the prose at the beginning of the poem, a story of a forgotten dream that I’m convinced is an utter fiction, indeed part of the poem itself. But never mind: “Kubla Khan” does just fine in its traditional form, and I had a great time reading it. Then I turned to “Frost At Midnight”–and encountered a huge surprise.

I had not read that poem aloud in public for decades, probably not since I was an undergraduate. I’d read it to myself many times since, and of course had read bits of it aloud here and there when I taught it, but not the whole thing, aloud, in public. As I read, I found the pent-up yearning inside the poet as he recalls his lonely boyhood got more and more intense inside my own spirit. The poet thinks of the longing he felt as he watched that film of ash on the grate, the fluttering “stranger” that portended a visit from … someone, and as I read the lines I felt something welling up inside me, too–an expectancy, a grief, an overwhelming hopefulness.

The scene in his memory ends The poet turns to look at his child who is lying in the cradle at his side. “Dear Babe,” the section begins. And as I read those two small words, I was overcome. I struggled through the rest of the lyric, unwilling to let it stop, and at times unable to keep it going.

I’ve decided to podcast the reading pretty much as it happened. You’ll hear a long pause at one point, and you’ll hear the evident emotion as I try to continue. I do make it to the end.

I worried a little about the people in the room, that they would think something was wrong with me, or my family, or otherwise. But there was nothing wrong. There was simply beauty, and love, all the way through. My thanks to STC for giving us this wonderful gift, this poem called “Frost At Midnight.”

I’ve turned off comments on this post. If you enjoyed the reading, please go read some Coleridge for yourself. There’s more where this came from.

And may all seasons be sweet to thee.

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WFB in 1984, about six years after I met him. Photo from NY Times story here.

Strange but true: I shook this man’s hand. It’s strange because I never enjoyed the two or three episodes of “Firing Line” I watched when I was a high school debater and eager to learn more about the dark arts of competitive argumentation. I didn’t like the snark (I can do snark, I understand snark, I do not like snark). I didn’t like the shouting and posturing. I didn’t like the predictability of the side-taking and the uber-partisan politics. I didn’t like the way WFB’s voice seemed to come out of his mouth and his nose simultaneously. And at that time in my life, anything remotely resembling patrician would get my hillbilly blood boiling. (I’m still not real big on patrician, but I don’t tar all patricians with the same broad brush anymore.)

But it came to pass during my junior or senior year at Wake Forest University–I forget which–that William F. Buckley, Jr. was invited to speak on campus. For reasons I no longer remember, but probably related to my work at Wake’s NPR station WFDD-FM, I ended up backstage with Buckley in the green room before he gave his talk. I shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries as best I could given my age and my mixed feelings about the encounter. Standing before him, I found that Buckley had a great deal of presence in person, though unusually so: it wasn’t a matter of physical size or charisma or extraversion so much as it was a matter of still intensity and a preternatural alertness. He seemed to me to be completely undistracted. That I was the person in his visual field was both unnerving and weirdly compelling, as he was completely undistracted from me, when there was no earthly reason he should be paying anything but cursory, polite attention to a 20-year-old college kid who had no clear reason for being in the room with him at all.

I’ve often noted how distractable many folks are in conversation. Their attention will wander, and their eyes will follow, and for some reason it doesn’t matter that the thread is lost. Most of the time these folks don’t even notice their attention has wandered, which of course suggests their attention has wandered long before any explicit sign of the wandering appeared. But Buckley had none of those signs of distraction. Quite the contrary. As soon as we had finished our how-do-you-do’s, he began asking me direct, warm questions about who I was and what I did at WFU. I answered him. He asked more questions, not to interrogate me, but certainly not as a matter of small talk either. I was shocked to get the strong feeling from him that he actually cared about my responses and was learning from them. I found this a little confusing, but also bracing. I mentioned that I worked at the campus NPR affiliate. He asked me how I liked that, what I thought about NPR, what programming I enjoyed most, what my particular role at the radio station was, and so forth. There wasn’t a whiff of condescension in his manner or his questions.

We couldn’t have talked for more than ten minutes, if that. I never saw him again in person. I didn’t follow his career, and I haven’t read his books–though one day I may–and I didn’t watch “Firing Line” with any more frequency or enjoyment than I had before. Nevertheless, in the years that have followed I have often thought of that brief conversation, and how rare it is to be able to feel any authenticity of encounter in such a situation, and how great it was when I did feel it that evening. I think what I felt a little of in that moment was not only Buckley’s intelligence but also his talent for friendship, a talent that many have testified to in the stories I’ve read since his death last week. That’s why I may yet read his books, whether or not I agree with any of his political points. In that moment, he not only put me completely at my ease, he taught me that I must never lose faith in the possibility of authentic conversation, no matter how exotic or odd the encounter.