Reed was one of my few living teachers in the poetry. He was legendary before I met him. When I finally did, he had just returned from Boston, where he had crashed one of Robert Lowell's classes - at BU or Harvard. Somehow, because of who he was, he made the poetry real for me in a way no one else had, and in a way that I think no one else could have.
 
            My intuitive voice had started out more or less classically, spontaneously producing rhymed and structured verse. But, by the time I met Reed, it had turned toward the modern. But I had no sense of the basis, apart from an intuitive sense of the line, when the poetry itself appeared. And, for a poet, I am quite literal - I need to know why. Reed's visceral pointing to Lowell opened the door to my first formal teacher in the modern.
 
            But Reed himself was the real teaching. I can only consider that first encounter with him as initiatory. I had read the Beats and learned a great deal. But I had no desire to encounter them. Somehow, Reed's commitment was ingrained. The Beats talked about the sacredness of poetry, when they were young. But, for example, by the time I met Ginsberg, he was using it as a sex handle. Whatever else happened throughout his life, I never experienced Reed to waver in his commitment, or violate the tacitly sacrosanct reverence he had for it.
 
            I will miss him. But, in a sense, he will always be with me.