Dryad
magazine and Dryad Press -- Merrill Leffler
www.dryadpress.com
That
thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of
beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in
full-throated ease.
--John Keats
I have before
me Dryad #1, Winter 1968. I don’t
think of myself as a nostalgist but I can almost call up the uncontainable
excitement I felt the afternoon I drove to the printer in Virginia and held the
new 40-page issue and its scent of pressroom ink in my hands. I mailed this
first sentence to Neil Lehrman and asked what he remembered. “Oh, that
afternoon holding copies of Dryad in
my office,” he said, “and the emotion I felt at what we had birthed. Off I went
to show our accomplishment to my work friends, none of who had any interest in
poetry. Still, I did force them to subscribe!” |
| Aerobee launch in Fort Churchill |
Neil
and I were an unlikely pair to start a poetry magazine – not just because of
our work lives. He was a newly-minted CPA and had returned to Washington – he
grew up in Silver Spring – to work as a financial analyst for the Securities
and Exchange Commission. I arrived in Washington in 1963 with a physics degree
and a position at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight as an aerospace engineer – all of
a sudden in my early 20s I was coordinating scientists, engineers, and
technicians for launching scientific experiments aboard a two-stage rocket, the
Aerobee, designed to reach orbital altitudes. I was on the road regularly to
oversee launchings at White Sands Missile Range, Wallops Island, and a Canadian
Army Base in Fort Churchill, Canada, midway up the Hudson Bay. Heady – at least for a
time.
It’s
not that one’s work life is incompatible with one’s poetry life – I think of
the Yiddish poet Mani Leib and the last lines of his Whitman-like “I Am,” wonderfully
translated by John Hollander. To all but his literary friends, Leib was a
shoemaker – know this, he wrote, “I am not a shoemaker who makes poems/ But I
am a poet who makes shoes.”
