The Nobel Laureate Who Rescued Me

In the winter of 2001, I was in my mid-20s, halfway through a six-year doctoral program in religion that left me uninspired.

Friends seemed to be moving forward—in life, in work, in romance.

Feeling stuck, I told myself I was taking a leave from graduate school.

What this meant was no more lying to myself that I was making progress toward my dissertation (I kept lying to everyone else).

Liberated from this pretense, I took a job as a newspaper reporter.

I also began auditing an undergraduate poetry class.

I’m not sure what inspired me to sit in on this course with Yale undergraduates.

Perhaps it was the sheer absurdity of reading and writing poetry with college students as a way into adulthood? In the introductory course on writing verse, we met once a week, read good poems out loud, and wrote bad ones under their inspiration.

Our teacher was the celebrated poet J.

D.

“Sandy” McClatchy.

He had a wonderfully resonant baritone, a perfect three-day stubble, and an infectious love of the art form.

He told stories about his friendship with James “Jimmy” Merrill , and he would sway his hand in time with the meter of the poems he incanted.

When students read their work out loud he gave candid, often brutal criticism.