None of my subjects, except for Robert Bly and Philip Levine, attended MFA programs.
None of my subjects, except for Robert Bly and Philip Levine, attended MFA programs. Only a few—Galway Kinnell, James Wright, and Philip Levine—became full-time tenured professors. The rest chose to teach intermittently while undertaking other vocations, such as freelance-writing (Donald Hall), horse-training (Maxine Kumin), and founding movements and literary magazines (Robert Bly). As a poet myself and great admirer of my subjects’ audacious generation, I was intensely curious about the provenance of these poets’ ground-breaking, subversive voices, as well as hopeful about learning invaluable lessons about life and poetry, in that order, from each of them as unique “courage teachers.”