Fame is ultimately banal. The stories Gary has collected are marvelous, mind you. Discussing orchids with Raymond Burr, priceless, as the Mastercard slogan would have it. The law of 6 degrees of separation means I am probably only one degree of separation from any given famous person, since famous people know more people. They get out more.

Is exchanging polite hellos with Regis in the St. Louis airport, as we were walking opposite directions, equivalent to glimpsing Borges being led to his lecture in Madrid? I almost met the King and Queen of Spain but had to leave to pick my daughter up before I could. My wife met them. My late father met Prince Charles once in an official capacity. I saw one of the 60 Minutes anchors outside the Metropolitan Museum in New York once. Morley Safer or Mike Wallace? I didn't even know at the time. My strategy is usually to pretend not to notice Mr. Famous Person. I was introduced to Stephen Spender when I was a kid and he came through town to give a poetry reading. Is that like having met Robert Blake (I haven't met him)? I've met Richard Eberhart. Robert Bly. Robert Creeley. William Stafford. Thom Gunn. Karl Shapiro. I know, to varying degrees, Jordan Davis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Ken Irby, Pierre Joris, and Kasey Mohammad. I've known Claudio Rodríguez and Francisco Brines. I've been to a poetry reading by Rafael Alberti. Another by Gonzalo Rojas. I've seen Juliana Spahr. I went to a poetry reading where a host of famous poets were present. Eileen Myles, Jerry Rothenberg, David Antin. I audited part of a course by René Girard. I've seen Billy Higgins in the flesh. He nodded at my applause. I had Kenneth Koch sign my KK books at a reading many years ago. I said something banal to him. I've had phone conversations with David Shapiro. Legendary minor poets have emailed me in response to my blog.

My mom was a waitress in the 1950s and the actor who played "Jethro" used to come in to the place she worked. He wasn't famous yet.