A Tribute to Richard Howard

I had the great pleasure of contributing to a little oral history/ tribute to my dear friend and mentor Richard Howard, who is being honored with the Paris Review's Hadada Award for lifetime achievement.  It features anecdotes like this from me and many others:

He told me this story. A bunch of poets, he and Lowell, among others—and I don’t know how one could corroborate this—they went swimming somewhere in a lake. This must have been in the fifties or sixties. They were all in the shallow part of the lake, and they were swimming through each other’s legs, which I guess is something that midcentury people did for fun. And Lowell—who was famously sort of crazy—apparently locked Richard’s head in between his legs when Richard was swimming through, and wouldn’t let him up for a while. When he finally did, Richard surfaced to find Lowell barking with laughter at this funny thing he’d done. But it scared the crap out of Richard. It was a time warp for me, hearing that story—this connection to a casual moment in the lives of two of my heroes.

Read the complete tribute here.