"The love of reality unpossessed transfigures us."
— William Bronk
In the fall of the feral year 1968, Denis Johnson, having been admitted at 19 to a graduate-level poetry workshop on the strength of his writing samples, was proving himself a wunderkind. Everyone in his class at the Iowa Writers' Workshop had to submit work for reading and critique, but his submissions alone were more than juvenilia. His first poem of the semester so stunned his classmates that, unable to offer any constructive criticism, they simply adjourned—and went off, as a group, to listen to Bob Dylan records. Next to his fully achieved verses, their own centaurine contributions—"half good, and half not up to par," one participant recalled—seemed amateurish. One day, the class instructor, a passionate young poet named Marvin Bell, read one of Johnson's lyrics aloud. When he finished, a general silence fell. The young aspirants looked down at their hands. "Well," one student said at last. "It's another Denis Johnson poem."
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