“A lifetime ago, when I was a bumbling graduate student at the Michener Center for Writers, I had the immense pleasure of taking a poetry class from Denis Johnson. Here’s what happened. He told us that we should keep two notebooks. In the first, he said, we were to write in the usual way—fretting, second-guessing, brooding. The second one, he said, was different because it was governed by a single rule—this notebook had to be a space where the pen never left the page, where we wrote everything down, no matter how bizarre or reckless it felt. The first notebook is your enemy, he told us, and the second is the only thing worth committing your lives to. I think of all the rough edges, impulsive leaps, obsessive engines, and quirky spillways of intellection that give my life its deepest meanings and pleasures. And what it all shares, of course, is born of that ‘second notebook.’ I should tell you the whole story. Denis gave us this advice, recited a W. S. Merwin translation of a Roberto Juarroz poem, wept openly at its beauty and humanity, then took us all bowling. I miss and love this man, who was a model for what a writer can, and should, be. Which is to say, he wrote and lived, true to himself.”
—Michael McGriff, author of Early Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)