It was only near the end of his life that I learned my father mentored other poets. I have vague memories of writers visiting us at our apartment in Manhattan, but never realized there might be more to it. Although I do have one stellar memory of my father standing in our kitchen holding a tape recorder microphone while a poet friend read aloud with gusto, when I blithely emerged from a nearby bathroom with the toilet in full flush and ruined it for them.
IRENE LATHAM
One of those he mentored was Irene Latham, a poet and writer in Birmingham. Irene later successfully nominated him to be the Poet Laureate of Alabama. To show his gratitude my father later dedicated “Climbing the Sky” to her in his book Overheard In A Drugstore. For her part, Irene was inspired to write a poem of her own about my father.
I Want to Be Eighty-Five
—for Andy
I want to be eighty- five
tucked between two hills
in a house that smells of morning
where a blind poodle sleeps on the chair
next to the white chair where you like to sit
I want to be eighty- five
with a jar of pencils worn to nub
but words like monkeys
swinging from vine to vine
then sliding down
down
into my mouth, my lips, the air
then finding a place in the white space
on a piece of pink paper
I want to be eighty- five
with a finch in a cage chirp chirping
while the one I love is out dancing
and Van Gogh sings of night from above the door,
and when you return
I say, when
you return
I’ll bring in the black cat for the sake of the birds,
pour you a cup of coffee –
black, with a dash of cream
and two spoons of sugar.
Irene Latham. from WHAT CAME BEFORE (Negative Capability Press, 2007)
Andrew Glaze and Irene Latham. Photo © Irene Latham
NOLA PEREZ
Nola was another of the poets that my father mentored. In 2000, my father wrote:
“In an era more and more boringly wedded to the mechanical, the safe and academically careful, Nola Perez is one of those high romantics who delight in taking chances, in making a splendid galleon bound for the sunset with all sails set, indifferent to storms. As in the title poem of The Continent of Dreams, she knows all about the darkness underneath our pilgrimage. She delights in travel poems like “Crossing At Chellah”, which are not really travel poems at all, but meditations. And she has the strongest possible consciousness of place and its iron-bound fetters of memory as in “The Returning”. Her languages is often quite beautiful and quite equal to the task she has set herself.”
And in 2015, Nola wrote the following tribute:
“My husband Andre Perez was attached to the American Embassy in Paris, France, for his FAA mission. We lived in Paris for four years. When we returned to the U. S., it was to Miami, where Andre had responsibility for South, Central America and the Caribbean. I experienced severe reverse culture shock, since in no way did I want to leave Paris, place of my heart. I actually went into therapy, but the person who helped the most with my transition was none other than Andy Glaze. A mutual friend of ours in New York, wrote me about Andy and told me to contact him. I did, and Andy and Adriana took us into their lives. I began to feel at home in Miami.
At one point, I asked Andy to work with me on my poetry, and become my teacher. Andy said, “Let me think about it, because I don’t want to do it because I like you; I want to do it because I want to.” Later he said, “it’s OK.” Thereafter, we met in his home once a week, sitting together at a little table. I learned more from him than any other mentor I had worked with, and I have worked with many fine poets. I keep a letter he wrote, in which he critiqued a poem to highlight an important problem in my writing. Recently, I shared a portion of Andy’s letter (dated April 24, 1996) with a newly organized poetry group here on Amelia Island. His intuitive comments are ones that have most influenced and improved my writing:
“I wanted to talk to you about the poems you sent me a bit ago. You have such a verbal felicity and such an excellent metaphoric sense. Your basic problem is that the rush and words and enthusiasm frequently bury the structure and simplicity at the heart of your poems…the rock center is there, but I think you are so fond of words and figures that you disable yourself from cutting them properly. A poet has to be two people—first, the Dionysian enthusiast who creates the poem in a rush and moment of emotion, and second, the hard-hearted absolutely ruthless technician who strips it down to what the poem essentially says, no matter much heartache it takes to say farewell to words you love. You must find the least you can get away with and still maintain the poem, saving the best words and metaphors and discarding the rest, dispensing with explanations and directions. The poem must say these things with metaphor rather than with explanation. I hope you won’t hate me.”
Well, I didn’t hate him. I took his counsel to heart, and I became a better poet.”
–Nola Perez
Nola dedicated her book The Alchemy of Loss “For Andrew Glaze and the Miami Days”.http://www.nolaperez.com/
Nola Perez with Andrew Glaze.
LINDA ALLARDT
Linda dedicated her poetry book River Effect to Andrew Glaze and one other supportive friend. Shortly before his death she also dedicated her book, Under Construction to him. She first met Andrew Glaze in the summer of 1948 at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Soon afterwards, they became engaged but broke it off after 4 months. At that point they lost touch for twenty years, but eventually reconnected and began a mutually supportive correspondence, trading poems and views on life until Glaze’s death in 2016.
“I first met Andy at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1948. He was a Bread Loaf Fellow and was giving a reading in the theater. I got up the courage to go up and talk with him afterward. Then he went to the grand piano and began to play. If he was trying to impress me, he succeeded. But it wasn’t until 20 years later when we both had poems in the same journal, that we got in touch again, and began our long correspondence. We seldom met, but I remember bringing him to the University of Rochester for a reading; we had a blizzard that night, but fifty people managed to get there to hear him. What a gift it has been, exchanging poems, manuscripts, books, over half a lifetime. He’s irrepressible.”
WOOD For A.G.
Struck mute by our tribal silence,
you called us woodlot people:
moved, we try to be wood,
to stand with trees’ deep-rooted
quiet against the deadly weather,
thunderclouds lumbering over, flood
insidious at the roothold,
as aware as one shagbark
of what harm saps another.
Wood is the sleep of fire,
fire the hunger of wood for air,
a hunger we share.
We cannot sleep.
What we should not know
takes us by the throat,
We can’t forget to breathe
for long. The air is full of voices
we can’t refuse, the field
Full of walking shadows
that can’t help drawing the lightening
to our standing firewood.
After my father died in 2016, Linda wrote the following poem about their time at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. It may have been her response to a poem he wrote on the same topic, which I sent to her after he died. She’d never seen it before.
Remember
In the corridors of the past, the doors
are not always locked as we supposed.
Sometimes in the night, a quiet word
in a voice long unheard, may say remember
driving up through the woods to the Inn?
Remember the creek we waded in?
And Bread Loaf mountain too high above us to climb?
The music you played on the Concert Grand
after your reading, remember?
And standing in the Inn drinking champagne
(that was the year of the hurricane)
touching the hand of Robert Frost before
they hurried him off to a place of safety,
while we walked through the rain to the theater,
were hastily handed diplomas and fled
to safety ourselves, remember? And next day
drove down the mountain and
into our lives again.
© 2021 for both poems by the Estate of Linda Allardt Gallasch
Andrew Glaze and poet Linda Allardt in 1948, at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Photo property of Andrew Glaze Estate. Her poem refers to “the Inn” which is the Bread Loaf Inn where the Writers’ Conference is held and where they met. She also refers to ‘wading in the creek” and this is a reference to a photo he took of her. You can see the photo if you read the Blog poem that he wrote about her, “Something, –Or Perhaps, Nothing”.
NORMAN ROSTEN
Norman was integral to the publication of my father’s first book, Damned Ugly Children, because he told the publisher to go ahead and do the book after their original advisor (anthologist Oscar Williams) died unexpectedly. My father and Norman quickly became good friends and began a common practice, among poets, of sending drafts of their work to each other for honest and trusted feedback. After Norman’s book Norman Rosten Selected Poems was published in 1979, Norman gave a copy of the book to my father with the handwritten inscription, “To Andy, poet, friend (see p. 154) — For advice & Encouragement (I needed both) in putting this damn thing together! Many Thanks — Norman. 12/’79”
Page 54 has the following poem. It is about a bicycle my father rode to and from work for awhile. Made with small wheels, it was designed for city use and came apart into two halves for easy transport and storage. I’m pretty sure I remember it came into favor after my father had the seat and wheel stolen from a regular bicycle while it was chained to a post outside his 5th Avenue office building. According to my stepmom, it was a French bicycle made by Peugeot. After Rosten died, my father wrote a poem of his own about Rosten, titled, “Ghost Writer”. That poem is the subject of one of my blog entries. You can find it in the side index that lists poems by title on the HOME page.
The Split Bicycle
(for Andrew Glaze)
Watching him clamp the sections together
(an anti-theft model),
I envision each half going its separate way:
one spinning downtown,
the other into northern New Jersey,
reunited somehow in Albany or Montreal.
And where’s the rider in all this?
He’s on both.
Perfectly happy on the rear wheel,
afloat, brakeless, pedaling away like mad,
I’d be the last to remind the man he’s bound to hit a wall,
or run right through a girl at a bus stop.
On the front half,
astride the handlebars,
he’s a cool driver,
steering gives him poise
and of course the hand brakes inspire confidence.
But without pedals
his energy is slack,
he can coast but not drive uphill or pass a firetruck.
Actually, his talent’s distributed equally.
And whether half the bicycle is chained outside
or all of it brought in from the cold
is a philospher’s trap:
what counts is the coffee,
the whole man,
The moment at rest, and the writer’s misery.
By Norman Rosten ©1979, from Norman Rosten Selected Poems.
Norman Rosten in the early 70’s, photo by Andrew Glaze, property of the Andrew Glaze Estate.
PABLO MEDINA
Pablo Medina is a Cuban-American poet and novelist who grew up in New York City. He is currently a Professor, and Director of the Masters of Fine Arts Department, at Emerson College in Boston. At the front of his 2005 poetry book, Points of Balance, Medina inscribed “Andy your voice appears here and there in these poems. Pablo 5/20/05”.
http://pablomedina.org/
In 2015, Medina wrote the following tribute for Andrew Glaze:
“I met Andrew Glaze in Miami, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. I’d just moved there and was searching for good poets like a crazed Diogenes. “Call me Andy,” he said. “I don’t want to be associated with that horrible storm.” Andy was gentle and welcoming, the complete antithesis of the hurricane. Whatever fury was in him came out in his poetry, which was then, and is still, determinedly engaged. I left Miami after two years and eventually Andy did too, but I have remained a steadfast reader and student of his work. I have learned from him how to be true to the craft, despite the many disappointments a poet must endure, and how to stand with dignity, grace and humor—always humor–before the storms that threaten to blow us away. Thank you, Andy, for your person, your friendship, and your extraordinary poetry.”
PETER SCHMITT:
Schmitt is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami, and the author of multiple collections of poems. Along with his other work, “Interview with Andrew Glaze” is a piece that was published in Birmingham Poetry Review in 2000.
In 2015, he wrote the following tribute:
“I first met the feisty but marvelously gentle and modest man called Andy Glaze at Books and Books, the hub of Miami’s arts community, in about 1990. Andy had just moved to Miami from New York, after his wife inherited a house there. Although nearly forty years separated us, we shared a friendship in poetry. Andy became like the favorite uncle I never had, especially after my father’s passing in 1996. I have been proud and grateful to consider Andrew Glaze my friend. Eventually, he and his wife Adriana moved back to Birmingham, thus completing a circle. Miami’s literary scene, and my own daily life, are poorer without him.
“Birmingham and Alabama,” he once wrote, “to me, are unfinished and unfinishable poems.” One hopes that Andy Glaze’s poems are never finished.”
D. STEVEN CONKLE
Considered a “Zen Poet”, Conkle was also a writer, poetry critic, interviewer, and a huge fan and supporter of my father. Unfortunately he died at a young age. I suspect that he was also one of several poets that my father mentored. In 1988 he did Small Press Reviews of my father’s publications titled A City, and Earth That Sings, in addition to reviews of them in The Columbus Dispatch newspaper. In his role as a reviewer for Ohio’s Kent State University publications he was also able to publish an essay/review of Andrew Glaze’s body of work he originally titled, “Image and Meaning: The Essential Artistry of Andrew Glaze”. In finished form it became, The Journal #12. “A Fierce White Light: One Perspective on the Poetry of Andrew Glaze”, Interview with Andrew Glaze by Steven D. Conkle. 1988-89, #2 Fall/Winter 1988-89, Pg. 84 – 88, Literary Magazine of The Ohio State University..
After my father passed away, I found a folder in his filing cabinet with the words, “My Best Critics Lamentably died young” hand written in large magic marker letters across the front. The entire content was letters, reviews, and poems by D. Steven Conkle. It was my father’s personal way of grieving and creating a tribute.
for andy glaze
the dog
at the end of the lane
-run down
a week ago-
filled
for three days
like a rising balloon
drew flies
and yesterday burst
hissing down
overnight
into skin
slung back
over bones
and filled
with maggots
it seemed a secret
hushed
and only whispered
and
i
should have stopped
and pluged my hands
down
into
that goo of process
and held
for a moment
that
sense of myself
By Steven Conkle,
(Published in a Spring/summer issue of Aura by the University of Alabama, Birmingham.)
dec. 15 almost
-for andy glaze
at christmas, 1990-
above the house
riding rising noon
time thermal
into a clear and brightening sky
two hawks
hovering
like suspended thoughts
of hawks
like the very
idea
of hawks
fanning trails then
dipping wings
as though willed
from inside the mind
as though
almost
one brain
one knowing
almost one
wingsinging
one
sighsoft saying of the
wind’s ways
almost
as though
almost
By Steven Conkle, 1990. Sent to Andrew Glaze as a greeting.
RICHARD EBERHARDT
Eberhardt gave my father’s first book, Damned Ugly Children, a rave review in The New York Times in the mid-60’s, and a mutual admiration friendship was begun. After Eberhardt died, Glaze dedicated his poem, “Smith” to Eberhardt. The titled referred to someone who is a skilled wordsmith.
TED HADDIN
Arrived to teach in the English Department of the University of Alabama Birmingham in 1973, and became close friends with my father not long afterwards. Highly supportive of my father’s work, he became one of a core group of poets that my father exchanged poems with for feedback, and helped edit one or more of his books on the way to publication.
Beyond Vegetables (for Andrew Glaze and Alan Perlis)
Almost before you left
he was gone, Alan the man.
What flight you both took
is not know. Gain and loss
are the same in Everlasting,
as Jesus said. Time, where
you are, does not exist.
Here, I chop vegetables
in chicken soup for men
and women who remember
their next of kin. In who
goes before and who stays
we are trying to call time
back, if it will. The strange
transformation of the human
is named in a book. Our hearts
break reading your poems.
Andy, in whom was no guile,
we sink with your long song.
It is enough, if only for awhile.
By Ted Haddin ©2016
Cyclist created by Ted Haddin, as a gift for the publication of Glaze’s book Reality Street.
EUGENE “BUD” BURDICK
My father became good friends with Bud Burdick when they both were invited to the 1946 session of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, as Fellows to assist the staff. Both of them impressed staff member Wallace Stegner, and he invited them to follow him to Stanford University in California to take part in a new program he had established for writers returning from the military. After 6 months, my father decided it was not the direction he wanted to go in and returned home to Alabama, but Bud stayed behind and kept in touch. A specialist in political fiction, Bud went on to co-author Fail Safe, and The Ugly American, both of which were best sellers in the ’60s that went on to become Hollywood Films. Sadly he died at the age of 46 from a heart attack while playing tennis. His death in the summer of 1965 was exactly when my father was having his first poetry book published.
1946 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Bud Burdick and Andrew Glaze taking a break on a blanket, and Bud taking a dip at a local water hole.
Photos property of the Andrew Glaze Estate.
Andrew Glaze Poetry 