Bill had a wonderfully soft touch as an editor, always considering what I wanted

for the poem rather than what he wanted. He had a great ear for sound and a great

sense of whether an image was “true” or not. His feedback never failed to make my poems better. I hope he would have said the same of mine.

 

Bill always worked to convince his students that people from any cultural and

economic background could make art, could aspire to literature, could be themselves

and tell their stories and that those stories would be valuable to the world. Dozens of

his former students, some of whom graduated 20 years earlier, returned to Elkins for Bill's memorial, as did the nurses from Bill’s oncology ward who fell in love with his tenderness and good humor while he was under their care. That speaks volumes.       

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Of course, for those who didn’t know Bill (and many who did), his poetry is his most durable and enduring legacy. As one might expect, Bill's poetry showcases

and explores his love of the natural world, West Virginia, the Appalachian region, fishing, his family and students, as well as his own mortality. It is a generous poetry

full of tenderness and close attention that rewards multiple readings.

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Of all the poems in Bloodroot, perhaps none offers a more accurate self-portrait than “Grown Boy Dreams of Water.” Water in all of its guises - streams, rivers,

rain and ponds - plays an important role in the mythology of Bill’s poems, as does dreaming, boyhood, and the importance of our connection to the natural world.

 

In this poem, the grown boy remembers the actual boy of his childhood, and the

dream journeys that are still possible before the tragedy of adolescence. Here, the

vehicle of the dream journey is his father’s displaced johnboat, made for the marshes

and estuaries of the coastal Carolinas, now dry-rotting in the mountains of Virginia.

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                 (…) Here, above tree-line,

the sky is a kerosene globe trimmed low

 

enough for stars, which I see from the bottom

of my father’s johnboat—hauled from South

 

Carolina to central Appalachia and beached

on the edge of a field. Sometimes, I’d unlean

 

it from its pine, tug it through tall grass, and stare

into a deep blue ocean.  (…)

                        from “The Grown Boy Dreams of Water”

 

While the story is never fully told, readers get a sense of the never-to-be-resolved

tension between the expectations of a stern Southern father and the gentler, more

open-hearted sensibilities of his dreamy poet son.

 

Bill had a gift for combining seemingly disconnected images into poems that are

both familiar and strange. In “Going Down the Hall on a Gurney,” for example,

the narrator, coming out of anesthesia after yet another cancer surgery, interrupts a

drug-induced reverie of boyhood baseball (Hey batter batter,  listen to my chatter,

batter batter - Suh-wing!) with a hallucination of the lips of the surgical nurse.

In his anesthetized mind, they become the snowy-white petals of the bloodroot,

the delicate spring ephemeral that gives the book its title.

​

... Can you tell me your name?

they say, And can you tell me

your date of birth? Yes,

I say, to the white blunt petals

of bloodroot that flutter

as she breathes. I was born

in May, I say to the purple

woods behind them,

I was born in May.

            from “Going Down the Hall on a Gurney”

 

This delightful, disorienting strangeness is but one of many enduring pleasures

to be found in Bill’s poems.

 

​​

On one of the last afternoons Bill and I spent working together on poems, we

sat in his backyard, going over the galleys of Bloodroot. He was so proud to see

his work presented so carefully and beautifully.

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He was also excited at the prospect of traveling around the region giving readings,

once the book was published. He had made plans to read at the Southern Festival

of the Book that October, and at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference

the following spring. Sadly, Bill never read publicly from the book, but he would

have been delighted at its success.

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That last afternoon, we sat in his back yard next to a fishpond no bigger than a

folding table, while we discussed Bloodroot and dreamed of giving readings and

traveling to conferences. Bill and his son Walter made that little pond, digging it out

and lining it, stocking it with fish and planting cattails along its bank. It was one of

his favorite places, appearing again and again in Bloodroot. One of my favorite

poems features that backyard pond and the frogs who’d visit each spring. In that poem, “Winter Song, ” he mourns the ephemeral nature of spring and longs to hear the spring peeper’s first call.  It provides a perfect accidental elegy for my friend, himself a lover of evening rain.

​

(…) all of this has gone now

unfleshed except for sky

scarred with jet trails

going anywhere but here

 

lover of evening rain

lover of last light

lover of small still water

that gazes at leaves

all summer

 

come back

                        from “Winter Song”

 

The novelist Tom Robbins once wrote, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” I think Bill believed that too and believed it was possible for everyone: his own amazing children (now grown), the boy whose blood he shed with a thrown stone forty years ago, the child that he himself was, and the “grown boy” he became, and by extension, you and me. Everyone. His optimism and open-heartedness live on in his powerful poems.

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Like the man himself, Bill’s poems are full of compassion and attention and intelligence. They are grounded in the natural world but establish no boundaries between where we end and the woods begin. His poems - to paraphrase

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney - “come at you sideways, and catch the heart

off-guard and blow it open.”

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