It was the turbulent spring of 1970. My second semester as a graduate teaching fellow at SUNY/Buffalo was drawing to a close, and it was time to start thinking about the focus for my oral qualifying examination. Beyond that, an even more terrifying prospect loomed before me like a ghostly, 300-page shadow, what to choose as my Ph.D. dissertation topic¿? I remember stopping timidly into the offices of various English Department eminences grises�Leslie Fiedler, Marcus Klein, Robert Creeley�and speaking with them about my newly kindled passion for modern poetry. In those heady days just after the untimely death of Charles . . .