"Sitting in the same classroom where Lowell had once curled over his desk, riffing on Milton before a group which then included Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck, it was now Derek delivering mesmerizing monlogues on Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, Auden, Braithwaite, Akhmatova, and Lorca to an intimate circle, which regularly accomodated visitors like Gertrude Schnackenberg, Rosanna Warren, and a shy bookstore clerk with a stentorian voice named Sven Birkerts. But the star of the class, clearly, was a young, sizzle-eyed poet named Melissa Green, with her frenzied hair and her impassioned staccato panegyrics on Horace’s Odes delivered, sometimes, apropos of nothing but the poet’s love of Horace." Askold Melnyczuk • Drunken Boat

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