Florida is not naturally associated with poetry, though Elizabeth Bishop wrote several poems about the state, and one of Wallace Stevens’ most famous poems is The Idea of Order at Key West. Key West was, appropriately, the town that Bishop and a number of other writers occasionally called home.
But poets are scattered all over the state: Campbell McGrath in Miami, Peter Meinke (the state’s current poet laureate) in St. Petersburg, David Kirby and Barbara Hamby in Tallahassee (in the same house) and now, according to last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Billy Collins in Winter Park.
Last week, browsing in Bookwise in Boca Raton, I picked up This Old Man, a collection of pieces (and letters) by Roger Angell. Angell, a careerist at The New Yorker, is the son of Katherine Angell, the New Yorker editor who married E.B. White.
He is also the brother of Nancy, who married a biology professor at Lafayette College and sat three pews in front of my family at Trinity Episcopal Church in Easton, PA. At Christmas and Easter the list of people in whose honor the flowers on the altar had been given always included “Katherine and E.B. White” and, starting in my college years, I thrilled at the sight of those literary names on the insert in our church bulletin.
Yesterday, “Fresh Air” replayed some old interviews with Pete Hamill, the great New York journalist and writer who died on Wednesday. Hamill, who had grown up Irish in Brooklyn, and worked for a time in Mexico City, was a friend and advisor to Robert F. Kennedy, and had been standing by Kennedy the night he was shot. In one of the interviews he explained that the candidate was able to win the California primary by getting the Mexican vote, and he got that vote, he explained, not through his famous charisma, but the fact that the Mexicans and the Irish have the same fatalistic view of life.
It's puzzling that during the five months of the pandemic nobody has written – presumably because nobody has wondered – about the fate of the travel writer.
One year ago this week I traveled to Lisbon for a story that appears today on Literary Hub: https://lithub.com/wandering-through-literary-lisbon-in-search-of-pessoas-disquiet/