For a few years now, I have been editing a series of interviews with presses on The Best American Poetry Blog called Meet the Press. This fall I decided it was time for someone else to take over the interviews. I wasn't sure who that someone else would be until I had the pleasure of corresponding with the amazing young poet, Dante Di Stefano, an editor and book reviewer at Arcadia Magazine. I invited him to do a few interviews for the blog. His interview questions as well as his interest in poetry and other poets reminded me of David Lehman many years ago, way back when he was my professor at Hamilton College. David had such a generosity of spirit and was so interested not only in his own work but in everyone else's poetry as well, I wanted to be his student forever. I am quite sure I wouldn't be a poet at all if I had not been his student. I think of him sometimes, picking up poetry books by the likes of O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch and saying, Listen to this! And the poetry would come alive in his voice. He also introduced me to the amazing Henri Michaux, my first true love--back then he was already translating Michaux poems. I believe he only had one book then, a chapbook called Day One. But the poems were already pure Lehman, such as this one:
