the very thing I needed most in my life

          Years ago--it would have been 1956 or 1957--when I was a teenager,
married, earning my living as a delivery boy for a pharmacist in
Yakima, a small town in eastern Washington, I drove with a prescrip-
tion to a house in the upscale part of town. I was invited inside by an
alert but very elderly man wearing a cardigan sweater. He asked me
to please wait in his living room while he found his checkbook.
          There were a lot of books in that living room. Books were
everywhere, in fact, on the coffee table and end tables, on the floor next
to the sofa--every available surface had become the resting place for
books. There was even a little library over against one wall of the room.
(I'd never seen a personal library before; rows and rows of books
arranged on built-in shelves in someone's private residence.) While I
waited, eyes moving around, I noticed on his coffee table a magazine
with a singular and, for me, startling name on its cover: Poetry. I was
astounded, and i picked it up. It was my first glimpse of a "little
magazine," not to say a poetry magazine, and I was dumbstruck. Maybe
I was greedy: I picked up a book, too, something called The Little
Review Anthology, edited by Margaret Anderson. (I should add that it
was a mystery to me then just what "edited by" meant.) I fanned the
pages of the magazine and, taking still more liberty began to leaf
through the pages of the book. There were lots of poems in the book,
but also prose pieces and what looked like remarks or even pages of
commentary on each of the selections. What on earth was all this? I
wondered. I'd never before seen a book like it--nor, of course, a
magazine like Poetry. I looked from one to the other of these publica-
tions, and secretly coveted each of them.
          When the old gentleman had finished writing out his check,
he said, as if reading my heart, "Take that book with you, sonny. You
might find something in there you'll like. Are you interested in poetry?
Why don't you take the magazine too? Maybe you'll write something
yourself someday. If you do, you'll need to know where to send it."
          Where to send it. Something--I didn't know just what, but I
felt something momentous happening. I was eighteen or nineteen years
old, obsessed with the need to "write something," and by then I'd made
a few clumsy attempts at poems. But it had never really occurred to
me that there might be a place where one actually sent these efforts in
hopes they would be read and even, just possibly--incredibly, or so it
seemed--considered for publication. But right there in my hand was
visible proof that there were responsible people somewhere out in the
great world who produced, sweet Jesus, a monthly magazine of poetry.
I was staggered. I felt, as I've said, in the presence of revelation. I
thanked the old gentleman several times over, and left his house. I took
his check to my boss, the pharmacist, and I took Poetry and The Little
Review book home with me. And so began an education.
          Of course I can't recall the names of any of the contributors
of that issue of the magazine. Most likely there were a few distin-
guished older poets alongside new, "unknown" poets, much the same
situation that exists within the magazine today. Naturally, I hadn't
heard of anyone in those days--or read anything either, for that matter,
modern, contemporary or otherwise. I do remember I noted the maga-
zine had been founded in 1912 by a woman named Harriet Monroe.
I remember the date because that was the year my father had been born.
Later that night, bleary from reading, I had the distinct feeling my life
was in the process of being altered in some significant and even, forgive
me, magnificent way.
          In the anthology, as I recall, there was serious talk about
"modernism" in literature, and the role played in advancing modernism
by a man bearing the strange name of Ezra Pound. Some of his poems,
letters and lists of rules--the do's and don't's for writing--had been
included in the anthology. I was told that, early in the life of Poetry,
this Ezra Pound had served as foreign editor for the magazine--the
same magazine which had on that day passed into my hands. Further,
Pound had been instrumental in introducing the work of a large
number of new poets to Monroe's magazine, as well as to The Little 
Review, of course; he was, as everyone knows, a tireless editor and
promoter--poets with names like H.D., T.S. Eliot, James Joyce,
Richard Aldington, to cite only a handful. There was discussion and
analysis of poetry movements; imagism, I remember, was one of these
movements. I learned that, in addition to The Little Review, Poetry was
one of the magazines hospitable to imagist writing. By then I was
reeling. I don't see how I could have slept much that night.
          This was back in 1956 or 1957, as I've said. So what excuse is
there for the fact that it took me twenty-eight years or more to finally
send off some work to Poetry? None. The amazing thing, the crucial
factor, is that when I did send something, in 1984, the magazine was
still around, still alive and well, and edited, as always, by responsible
people whose goal it was to keep this unique enterprise running and
in sound order. And one of those people wrote to me in his capacity
as editor, praising my poems, and telling me the magazine would
publish six of them in due course.
          Did I feel proud and good about this? Of course I did. And
I believe thanks are due in part to that anonymous and lovely old
gentleman who gave me his copy of the magazine. Who was he? He
would have to be long dead now and the contents of his little library
dispersed to wherever small, eccentric, and probably not in the end very
valuable collections go--the second-hand bookstores. I'd told him that
day I would read his magazine and read the book, too, and I'd get back
to him about what I thought. I didn't do that, of course. Too many
other things intervened; it was a promise easily given and broken the
moment the door closed behind me. I never saw him again, and I don't
know his name. I can only say this encounter really happened, and in
much the way I've described. I was just a pup then, but nothing can
explain, or explain away, such a moment: the moment when the very
thing I needed most in my life--call it a polestar--was casually,
generously given to me. Nothing remotely approaching that moment
has happened since.

[Raymond Carver {1938-1988}, 'Some Prose on Poetry' from A New Path to the Waterfall]