Sometimes, in this kind of dark
winter evening, or is it spring,
a name passes through my mind, or
another name, of people I barely knew
and do not know now, and then I look
for them, and find the strangest things.

That’s what happened tonight, as I waited for my friend Heather to get home so we could go somewhere nearby for dinner. The name of a guy I went to grad school with came through my mind. He wasn’t someone I was close to, wasn’t someone I got along with very well, and I probably wouldn’t go too far out of my way to see him, but his name did pass through my mind, and I wondered whether he’d gotten anywhere with his writing. While most successful writers spend their time doing something other that puttering about online—I swear there’s a lesson for me in that—most young people I know who are making a place for themselves in writing can be tripped up by an online search: my friends Jack, Helen, and Medrie all come up, for example.

Well, there is a well-known poet named David Wright but that’s not who I was looking for. Ah, here’s the David I knew: studying Ezra Pound at McGill University. Studying alongside at least one other ex-Concordia classmate, Erin Vollick… Seems he’s using the N. initial in his name, probably because someone else is going by the initial-less form. Actually, I remember when he was going by dnwright, which was a little too net/cummings for me, but anyway… there he is, at McGill, studying Pound.

Hey, along the way, I found a worthwhile poem by that other David Wright, called Poems Should Not Be. Of all the links you should follow in this post, this is definitely the first.