Page 13 - Litteratteur Redefining World December issue

Litterateur redefining world December 2020

Exiles

"Kid, I didn't think you'd be able to go."

My father was surprised and delighted when I won scholarship money to go to
college. One of the scholarships, the major one, came from Western Union. Western
Union provided three prizes for children of its employees: first prize was a full
scholarship to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. The other two scholarships were less
money, but you could go to any school you wished. I won first prize. "Kid, I didn't
think you'd be able to go," my father told me, "I didn't have the money." With a

probably misplaced zeal I simply assumed I was going to college and that the money
would somehow take care of itself. Amazingly, it did.

Jack in the three-room apartment in Port Chester.
Behind is an ancient Web Cor tape recorder. Jack
is reading Noel Coward’s autobiography. Photo
ca. 1956, probably taken by my mother.

I had come to Port Chester in 1943. When I left in 1958 I understood myself to be a
poet. My essay, "Home/Words," in Exiles (1996) deals with the moment in 1955 at
which I discovered poetry. "Someone -probably a teacher, perhaps Angela Kelley, who
was Italian but who had married an Irishman -suggested that I read Thomas Gray's
18th-Century poem, 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.' I had no idea why the
teacher thought the poem would appeal to me. I thought it very unlikely that I would
have much interest in it, but I looked it up in the library and took it home...The poem
seemed to me the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. [It] affected me so deeply
that I wanted it to have come out of me, not out of Thomas Gray, and I immediately sat
down and wrote my own Gray's 'Elegy,' in the same stanzaic form and with the same
rhyme scheme as the original.

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