With Ken Irby in Border's yesterday afternoon. He showed me Joe LeSoeur's memoirs, "Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara," which I almost bought. It is unusual to go to Border's at 4 p.m. and NOT run into Irby.

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The essay on the period style is taking shape. Translation ought to enrich the language. Instead, translation from the Spanish tended to create a new "poetic diction." In the 1970s, Merwin writes in a vocabulary of 500 words (maybe 1000). Edson's restricted tone and lexicon. I'd like to show with some precision how the early 1970s deep image poem turned into the mid 1970s suburban creative writing workshop poem, and led to the creation of "Dean Young."

Of course, I haven't read the one-act play I'm teaching in two hours.