I loved being an English major, even when everyone around me thought I was nuts, even as it drove my parents crazy out of worry for my job prospects. It was the mid-1980s, and who was going to hire someone with a liberal arts degree from a small, unheralded Midwestern college where all the cool kids were studying marketing or computer science?
I would just stare blankly and politely nod at my roommates when they talked about their case studies on some guy named Sam Walton, or fretted over lines of computer code on dot-matrix printer paper. I just wanted to go back to reading the good stuff, like the poetry of Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath or Howard Nemerov. I thought I was the lucky one. So what if it wasn’t going to take me a bit longer to find a job? It did. But 36 years later, it all worked out.
Now, I get to write stories for Washington University like this one, when the opportunity arises to interview the rock stars of the poetry world. Here’s the story I wrote that appeared for an online edition of Washington Magazine, part of a team effort in Public Affairs to promote poetry for National Poetry Month.
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