I started WWC MFA at age 53, terrified. Worse than terrified, ashamed— of not having written or submitted anything for over 15 years, of having deliberately given up poetry in the ‘70’s as a self-indulgence no one ought to be able to afford, and also of having lived approximately next door to the Goddard program here in Vermont for however many years it was, without even having noticed it! I felt old, rusty, and futile: paradoxically, my life was so ineffectual without writing poems, that I might as well write poems! But I had to do an awful lot of dithering first. I did my dithering on Steve. O dear! Packets of long long letters chockablock with the gory details of my long long sad story. All this as I huddled over ancient fragments I’d written and packratted, trying to breathe a little life in, or out. Steve put up with all this. I couldn’t have endured that first semester with anyone who didn’t. Composing a poem as so hard! It is still so hard! One thing Steve did was suggest to me that it might be easier than I thought, or that I could at least try writing-easy to begin with, relax, let come-what-might for a draft, that sort of thing. I rejected this notion until, a few times, I got so desperate at the emptiness of my pending packet that I just held my nose & did what he recommended, rattled off any old thing, pretended, bluffed, tried to let-go into shamelessness. Steve said he liked those poems, and it’s possible he did; his natural aesthetic is looser, more narrative & meditative than mine. I hated one of them so much that I would have nothing further to do with it, but another survives, part of the mz oeuvre, anomalous, a road-not-taken, or not again, as it seems to me. So the panic of difficulty I faced became, I realized, my choice. Not because of my stupidity, distemper, laziness, lack-of-talent or moral disqualification, but my choice: the hard stuff (stuff that’s hard for me) was what I wanted to do. Oh! OK. I guess I can bedevil myself with all that angst if I want to. Thank you, Steve. Thanks for telling me to “ride the music.”