WE USED TO MEET FOR CLASSES. SOMETIMES IT WAS ECSTASY, SOMETIMES BLAH
—from Rattle #10, Winter 1998
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Daniel Berrigan (from the conversation in Rattle #11): “I think it had a lot to do with our father who, for years, was turning out awful stuff but who had great ambitions and who was very well read but was stuck, I would say, in the romantics of the 19th century, and he never got out of it. He was a big Shelley man, a Keats man, etc., though he knew a lot of Shakespeare, too. Anyway, I was typing a lot of his stuff, under duress and much against the grain. We had this old, old manual typewriter, and I was always getting it wrong, because he was meticulous about all this punctuation. I didn’t like the stuff to start with, so it was really kind of a bondage. But I guess in a kind of curious way it got me very interested in poetry and eventually, as a very young person in high school, writing poetry. Then, of course, in the order we had a vigorous regime of poetry in Latin and Greek and English, and later in French. So I sort of swam with the tide at that point. I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped.”
