Michael Hettich: “When I was a child, my father would sometimes read poems to me, in the evening before dinner, while he sipped a cocktail. T.S. Eliot was his favorite. Though I didn’t understand what they were about, the cadences and images charmed and moved me deeply. They also haunted me. Then, 15 years later, in a creative writing class taught by James Crenner, I came across Casar Vallejo’s ‘Black Stone Lying on a White Stone,’ in the Bly Knopf translation, and was transfixed and transformed by the language, and by the possibilities. I knew then that I wanted to try to do something like that, someday. Maybe, if I was lucky …” (web)
Michael Hettich: “I don’t remember how old I was when my father sat me down beside him on the living room couch to read to me from his favorite poets, but I do know that I was young enough to understand very little of what the poems meant, and that their meaning didn’t really matter at all. My father seemed another person when he intoned these poems, and yet he seemed exactly himself. And I felt very close to him then and very much myself: happy and pregnant with vivid possibilities.” (web)