Talking Together

"The idea of communication or community pervades everything I've written." So concluded the poet David Ignatow - from his perspective as a septuagenarian - in a 1985 letter to his literary executor, Roy Harvey Pearce. For this poet, staying in touch with his colleagues and editors through written correspondence amounted to an affirmation of his own existence. Spanning nearly four-and-a-half decades of communication, a collection of David Ignatow's letters has now been compiled and edited by poet and critic Gary Pacernick, one of Ignatow's recent correspondents. Pacernick's sensitively selected compilation, Talking Together, traces the poet's career from his youthful stance as a workingman-poet, through his gradual midlife recognition by his fellow artists as a voice of distinction, and on through his establishment as an important contemporary poet. Written for the most part at post-breakfast sittings and addressed with remarkable regularity to such illustrious recipients as William Carlos Williams and Ralph J. Mills, Jr., the letters demonstrate, for Ignatow, an otherwise unseen range of human emotion, adding an important new dimension to his published work. With their straightforw