Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2026.
Try a Little Tenderness by David Rigsbee.
A chapter from my memoir Three Teachers: Kizer, Brodsky, and Rorty.
I was a fellow at the Djerassi Foundation in the late 1980s, an art colony which happened to be situated next to Neil Young’s farm south of Palo Alto when Carolyn Kizer called and said, “Diane Johnson has invited us to a dinner party. You’ll have a good time. There’ll be a room full of writers and poets, and I want to introduce you to the short story writer Alice Adams.” I had only heard the name. She admitted later, “I think you will like her. She comes from your part of the world, you know.” I sensed a setup, although Carolyn neglected to add that Alice Adams already had an interesting partner, a well-known interior designer, one of whose credits was to have been punched by Norman Mailer at a party.
Carolyn, her husband John, and I arrived at “Dinnie” Johnson’s house in San Francisco, where the diminutive Dinnie greeted us, along with her husband John, a prominent pulmonary surgeon. I flushed when realized I had a pack of Larks stashed in the breast pocket of my sport coat. Wanting to avoid a sermon, I turned to insert the pack in my inside pocket and afterward hunched my shoulders as I spoke to the surgeon. Lark had been advertised as the “safest” cigarette, and I, along with my brother, remained loyal to the brand that had been made by our father at Liggett & Myers in Durham.
The party was already in full swing. Robert Sward was there, a poet whose work I admired. Amiable and engaging, with a broad smile and sweep of still-dark hair, Sward talked about his influences and admiration for Carolyn. Edward Hirsch appeared, the only person younger (marginally) than me, although he exuded a maturity and polish beyond my range. I also thought the same about his poems. Looking around, I spotted Philip Levine and Gerald Stern, both arriving in trench coats, Phil adding his trademark fedora. In one corner, Dinnie was engaged with the turtle-headed Leon Edel, Henry James’ biographer, who had arrived in his beret. As I looked around, I realized Dinnie’s husband had escaped the cocktail portion of the evening, disappearing shortly after greeting the guests.
Before long, Carolyn swooped in with Alice Adams in her grip and introduced me, and once she was satisfied she had made a connection, stepped away and headed for Phil and Jerry. I liked Alice at once. I explained to her that my father had grown up in Chapel Hill and that I had attended the university, where I studied with Carolyn and often visited with Max Steele. We agreed that Max was an underrated master of the short story. She was curious to hear that at the end of his career he had become something of a recluse, rarely departing from his purple house near campus, except to attend to his academic duties. I said that he had once been a purveyor of literary party life, along with his wife, Diana, mentioning that Max and Diana had introduced me both to steak tartar and caviar—outlandish food items— when I was a student. Alice replied that there was in fact caviar here at the party, offering a slightly buck-toothed grin by way of affirmation.
When called to dinner, we were served baked salmon at a long farmer’s table. I sat with Alice on one side and Levine on the other. Everyone deferred to Dinnie, who offered gossip about writing for The New York Review of Books and of fellow fiction writers, especially Alison Lurie, her friend and competitor, who also wrote for the NYRB and had won a Pulitzer, unlike Johnson, who was recently only a finalist for the prize. Then she turned to Leon Edel and asked him if he had finished with his massive biography of Henry James and whether he had anything else he wanted to offer. Edel, who modestly replied that he was working on a condensed version, culled from the five-volume work, said that he needed to determine which episodes would provide the most helpful introduction to James’ life. As far as I know, no such abridged work ever emerged. Everyone was interested in James’ private life, including Carolyn, who asked him bluntly if James ever acted on his homosexuality. Edel responded that the evidence was inconclusive. Carolyn added that the very fact suggested a positive answer.
I inserted myself at this point, as I knew Edel had been editing the diaries of Edmund Wilson. I said that I had been teaching at Hamilton College some years before, when our department chair had been approached by Rosalyn Wilson, the writer’s daughter, to find out if any graduate student would be interested in house-sitting Wilson’s stone house in tiny Talcottville, NY, some forty miles to the north. Of course, we had no graduate students, but my chair mentioned a young instructor who might be interested in spending a summer there. He had recommended Wilson’s Upstate (recently published) to me, which I read with pleasure. I was also familiar with A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley’s autofiction about a despondent writer obsessed with baseball and with Wilson himself, whose house sat in the middle of nowhere looking off across fields of Timothy grass and Queen Anne’s Lace to the Adirondack foothills. Exley would sit in front of Wilson’s house in his car, without having the courage to get out and go meet the occupant. I told the story of meeting Rosalyn Wilson, getting the key to the house and spotting a telltale butterfly net in the umbrella stand in the foyer—a present, I imagined, from his then-friend Vladimir Nabokov. Their friendship was to end in acrimony when Wilson had the cheek to make a small critical caveat to Nabokov’s three-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in the NYRB. The table liked this detail. Edel asked me if I had seen the famous window, explaining to the other guests that Wilson had purchased a diamond-tipped pen for visiting writers to autograph the glass. I said that the window had been removed and put in storage after Wilson died, Rosalyn fearing further vandalism of the empty house, which has already been burglarized once. I wanted to mention that I had written a poem about the stone house and had received a letter of appreciation from Wilson’s widow Elena, then living in Wellfleet, when it appeared in The American Poetry Review, but I held my breath.
Sward had departed before dinner, and I was sorry to see him go, hoping to talk to him more. Jerry and Phil, sitting next to each other, bantered amiably, pitching some questions to Ed Hirsch. Dinnie was working on Edel. I kept chatting with Alice, while Carolyn eyed us with a hint of satisfaction from across the table. After some back-and-forth, after the dinner plates had been taken away, and after we had refreshed ourselves with more booze and wine, it was decided that we should all participate in a little game. We would go around the table and each recite a poem from memory. This made me nervous. Carolyn suggested that Ed Hirsch go first. As I remember, he rendered something from Hart Crane impressively and we clapped. Phil Levine was next, and he duly recited the opening of Song of Myself. Next was Edel, who passed, then Carolyn, who recited Dickinson. Then it was Gerald Stern’s turn. He began reciting Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” then looked up and down the table to see the reaction. Alice Adams passed, and eyes trained on me. I had quickly planned to recite Ben Johnson’s little poem about the death of Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, something I remember Carolyn had also committed to memory and declaimed to us once back in Chapel Hill days. I was afraid of flubbing the poem, brief as it is, but I delivered anyway, hoping to capitalize on the striking last line. The poem goes like this:
Underneath this sable verse
lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother;
Death! ere thou hast slain another,
Lean’d and fair, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.
The group nodded. Carolyn observed that it was one of those poems in which minimalism and condensation acquire a larger importance with each line, almost in inverse proportion to the poem’s length—or lack of it. We went around again. Levine recited a poem by Countee Cullen, and Jerry followed with Yeats’ “The Stolen Child,” a four-stanzed poem, three of which stanzas end make the refrain,
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Carolyn complimented Jerry on his recitation and asked him if he had many poems by heart. She pointed out that her teachers, Roethke and Kunitz, drew on his example in their own work. Jerry snuffled and replied that he tried to memorize all the poems he liked. There was a pause. Carolyn asked him about Dylan Thomas, and Jerry responded began reciting “Fern Hill.” By now it was on. “What about Eliot?” she wondered. Jerry sat back and began reciting the opening of Eliot’s “Little Gidding.” Then he began in on Keats’ odes, starting with the “Ode on Indolence.” Carolyn asked him about Stevens, and Jerry recited “The Snow Man” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” We were all affected that he had memorized so much of what we thought we knew, but more—and verbatim. No matter which poet was tossed into the mix, he could recall poems at once. We all realized that we had been present at a demonstration. Of what? Mastery and simple love, I suppose. After these effortless recitals, we said our goodbyes and left.
On the ride back, John said that Jerry Stern’s performance was most impressive. “I didn’t realize Jerry had such a capacity as that.” Carolyn, who had been quiet, replied, “People have thought him a kind of yawping Jewish Whitman, but he’s a real student of the forms he doesn’t use. It’s a pity he arrived on the scene well into middle age, while his young buddy, Jack Gilbert, coasted for decades on the Yale Prize won in his twenties. Jerry must have felt wounded by that. He’s undoubtedly the better poet.” I agreed. By the time he emerged from obscurity in middle age, he had suddenly been everywhere at once, already on his way to becoming a beloved figure in the poetry world, a world not known for mutual tenderness. With luck of my own, I was to find my name printed on the cover of The American Poetry Review, more than a decade before. There was Jerry’s rubbery face, cloth watchman cap, and horn-rimmed glasses, adorning cover. His Lucky Life poems, the volume that finally introduced him to the poetry-reading public and established his name, not to mention his dazzling, exuberant talent.
We had met at that time, the summer of 1977, when I was driving up and down the east coast with poet Linda Gregg, reading W. C. Williams and Heidegger aloud and debating the fine points of Williams’ “The Red Wheel Barrow.” We stayed with him at his gingerbread house in Lambertville, NJ, as he had long been a friend of Linda’s, owing to her former partnership with Jack Gilbert. In spite of that hospitality, I didn’t see him again until the party at Johnson’s. A votary of mischief, he recounted schooling Paul McCartney at some fancy party on the earlier recorded version of “Try a Little Tenderness,” by Jimmy Durante—not Otis Redding. A point of order, perhaps, but it led to an impromptu duet between the two. If anything he had grown even more ebullient, riding a wave of acclaim and wild accomplishment that was to continue until his death at ninety seven. Despite Carolyn’s passing approval of Jerry’s work, he was ever so slightly guarded concerning hers. What’s more, her flamboyance and superior airs stood in contrast to his earthiness. After all, he had risen from Pittsburgh, a Jew of Ukrainian and Polish descent. Still, he gave her respect for her craftsmanship and clarity. Yet on his view, Carolyn’s work, while appealing and engaged, lacked the note of tragedy that sounded behind his poems. He would not go on to write “Afternoon Happiness,” her wistful poem about the shrinking of tragedy in the midst of new-found domestic bliss. Instead, he would write the majestic and antic “The Dancing,” his poem about celebrating the end of the war in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine from his childhood home in “beautiful filthy Pittsburgh,” which ends ecstatically with an outcry, “oh God of mercy, oh wild God.”
© David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2024.