Title: THE LECTURER'S ARIA
Author: Gerrit Henry
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, New York

Gerrit Henry was a sophomore and I a junior at Columbia College when we met in the fall of 1968. Kenneth Koch, whose writing course I had taken a year earlier, invited me to sit in on a class with his new group-he knew that I, as an editor of Columbia Review, was eager to recruit good writers for the magazine. It was the week of Kenneth's sestina assignment, and the cleverest example was turned in by Gerrit Henry. Sestina was one of the six recurring end-words in his poem; a "Mrs. Sestina" made an appearance, and the poem referred to itself jubilantly as a "sestina sestina." An even better Gerrit Henry poem, "The Young Poets," was published in Columbia Review a little later. It remains the most marvelously accurate send-up of what it was like to be a young poet in that intensely literary Columbia community:

There was a kind of introspective silence for a moment,
Then a new and male young poet timidly entered the room.
"Will you read my poem?" he asked, and gladly they agreed.
The young poet Alan answered first, "This poem is fine,
Except for one thing in this poem I do not like,"
He looked around the room and the others agreed,
"The one thing in this poem we do not like
Is the use of the word 'beer.'
Otherwise this is a long and good poem,
One of ours," he looked him in the room
As the others began to nod sleepily,
"You will be welcomed here."

In the twenty years that have passed, Gerrit Henry has quietly accumulated an impressive body of work with a stamp all its own-what critics used to call "a distinctive voice" back in the bad old days of the good young poets.

David Lehman