I was so surprised and happy yesterday to discover Maureen Doallas's review of my anthology, A Poet's Sourcebook. Reviews make me nervous, always--not only because I fear that someone will hate my book but also because I can't help perceiving glitches between what I did in the book and how someone else absorbed it. My Milton memoir has been particularly prone to such readings. This is normal, and is often even enlightening, but I worry anyway ("I'm so stupid, why didn't I see that before, people will think I'm an idiot," and other such pointless flagellations).

But Maureen seemed to take in the anthology in a way that paralleled my intentions. This may be easier in an edited work as opposed to an entirely original construction; but as I discovered while I was working on A Poet's Sourcebook, compiling an anthology is subjective. There are no obvious selections to include. For instance, is Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" necessary and exciting or the tedious emotings of Nineteenth-Century Important White Guy? I fall into the "necessary and exciting" category, but plenty of other people don't. All the syntheses that I perceive between Shelley's treatise and the writings of subsequent poets and critics (John Berger, Audre Lorde, etc., etc.) may not register with other imaginary editors.

In any case, I'm grateful to Maureen for sharing my fascination with "the kinds of serendipitous discoveries that accompany re-familiarizing oneself with the texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Ovid; re-engaging with the likes of Shakespeare, Bradstreet, Milton, and Blake; re-considering Shelley and Keats, Bronte and Whitman, Dickinson and Rilke, Woolf and Pound; and recalling the depth of inspiration and breadth of influence of Rich and Levertov, Snyder and Milosz." I have spent a lifetime fluttering here and there among my books, and one of the gifts of this project was the way in which it forced me to annotate, and thus justify, my desultory reading patterns.