Marion K. Stocking, my colleague at the Beloit Poetry Journal, died this morning, peacefully, I'm told, on a cool and lovely spring day. Just yesterday I'd been watching a female goldfinch fussily beaking up bits of hay and then dropping them in favor of other bits of hay, and I was wondering why some bits were better than others or if the finch was just wasting valuable nest-building time, having had a quarrel with Mr. Finch or that obnoxious nuthatch around the corner. No doubt, Marion could have explained, though she might have been impatient with me. Apparently she'd been known to reject a poem solely on the grounds of minor ornithological error . . . and anthropomorphizing did not count as minor.

Well, I will miss her, though I'm very fond of anthropomorphizing. Nobody loved that journal like Marion.