Conceived by Eve Grubin, the former curator at Makor now Programs Director for the Poetry Society of America, the evening played out quite nearly as much as a tribute to the (mental) state of Vermont as to Carruth, its acknowledged, though untitled poet laureate, whose writing room for years was a tiny cowshed, his companions a woodstove in winter and floorboard mushrooms in summer. That rural red maples colored the listener consciousness amid the obstructive white enormity of the Great Hall's bearing pillars is a credit to the warmth and imagination of long-time friends (and part-time Vermonters) Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, David Budhill, and others, who read from Carruth's vast body of work and correspondence.

After a welcoming address by PSA Executive Director Alice Quinn, Budhill read with fast-paced fluidity. Carruth played clarinet and the two shared a great love for jazz ("The piano softened like butter in his hands"; "poised on the always fulcrum of / the blues"). For thirty years, the older poet would finish a piece and tell his friend, "That was my last poem." Still, they kept coming. Marilyn Hacker applied her exemplary vocal command to excerpts from "The Sleeping Beauty," written in a 15-line form of Carruth's own invention, in which a sleeper dreams all of human history ("Why dost thou tear me? / Have I done thee hurt?" ­ Lilith), and to a new piece, "On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam," in which Carruth lists the many war protests he had written "and not one breath was restored to anyone," but persisted, for the image of "a child's half-smile to make sure I was noticing."

Sam Hamill of Copper Canyon Press, Carruth's publisher and editor for thirteen years, praised him for having the broadest palette of any poet of our time and as a master and inventor of form. When Hamill commented that Carruth's solitude reminded him of a Chinese poet he had translated, Carruth claimed to know little about his work--but soon produced a cycle based upon it. ("Your language has no tenses.") In another linguistic exchange, Carruth objected when Hamill called his brook a "creek." The West had creeks, he corrected. How far West does one need to go to before a brook became a creek? Carruth's ready answer: Ohio.

Galway Kinnell acknowledged the evening as "a bright moment in these sad weeks" [following the World Trade Center attack], and invoked the "long and colorful tradition of democratic debate" in the hall in which we sat. Carruth came late to formal teaching (Syracuse University), but was always teaching, Kinnell said, without knowing it. Also, with his reviews, he had done a lot of the hard work of developing audiences for poetry, had eked out a living writing reviews for pay others would have regarded as pocket change. When the two occasionally met in Vermont and Kinnell would inquire how the writing was going, and Carruth would deny he was working on anything. Soon after, a new volume would inevitably appear. Kinnell chose to read from "The Bloomingdale Papers," composed during one of Carruth's many institutional confinements. "Alcoholics have the easier time of it; / hold themselves aloof from the rest of us / who are crazy." Kinnell noted that for all his volumes, Carruth delighted in discovering an ordinary word that he had never used before, in one case, the verb "to shed."

Joe-Anne McLaughlin, a poet and Carruth's present wife, read a poem in praise of Hayden‹and his other wives. Adrienne Rich described how as young, little known poets, she, Kinnell and Carruth had set up a poetry booth in a Vermont country fair. After several hours of marvelous conversations with the townfolk, but no sales, they had signed one another's books and gone home. She exchanged letters with Carruth for decades, and quoted from one written in his cowshed, in ­8 F temperature. "Men are at best a paradigm . . . row upon row sowing the ashes." Jean Valentine read from several of Carruth's letters to her and to many friends so ill they could not write back, Jane Kenyon for one. About his floorboard mushroom: "A lonely old man in the morning will make friends with almost anything." Once the mushroom had strewn its spores, Carruth's asthma forced him to pitch it. "Bloodlines mean nothing. I was closer to the mushroom."

Now very frail, the one-time subzero-winter reviewer and correspondent‹with the Rip Van Winkle beard--was helped to the microphone amid a standing ovation. Forgetful now he said, he had forgotten writing most of the poems Rich read. He had forgotten to bring his book too, and so borrowed one from Kinnell. He decided spontaneously on which piece to read. "I don't like those poems with repeated words. What do you call those?" ("Sestinas," came the response.) "Yeah, they're like garbage can lids, with a leak. This is a terza rima."

With that, he read a keen reminder of man's adventures in demagoguery. "Let young people read to him / name after name / of those he's shot." Adolf Eichman.