I met Chuck Miller through my friend Joe Michaud. The three of us had lunch at a Mexican place on the south side one Thursday. Chuck was a member of The Writers' Workshop, but does not associate with those people anymore. He moved on. To look at him you'd think he was just a grumpy old man -- which he is -- but there is so much more to him. He has taught English on four different continents and devoted most of the last fifty years, his entire adult life, to living and writing poetry. At lunch, he told us he was waiting for a translator to finish a long-dead Peruvian(?) tomb in order to finish a poem he was working on. He has never been shy with an opinion, which isn't always great with regards to employment, as he has very high standards. I'm trying to be polite. What I should say is that Chuck shoots his mouth off and loses jobs, always has. Some people are sensitive and don't want to hear negative things even if the source of the negativity has a valid point.
It turns out that Chuck lives in my town, not far from me. One day towards the end of December, I lent him my copy of More Notes from a Dirty Old Man by Bukowski and gave him a copy of The Judge T Chronicles. In exchange, he gave me a book of his poems, Crossing the Kattegut, which I read right away and liked. I had kind of forgotten about the exchange. I moved on and worked on other things. My phone was dead when I got up this morning, so I plugged it in and and found out I had a voicemail. It went like this:
Hey, this is Chuck.
Read your book.
It's good, so
be happy.
All right.I'm going to follow his advice.
Bye bye.
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