I​

  ​

      For a week in late 1989 I stopped off after work each day at Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary to visit my boss, Stratis Haviaras, curator of the university’s Woodberry Poetry Room. It pained me to see this free-spirited, gregarious man, a fixture of the Harvard and Cambridge literary scenes, looking wan in a flimsy hospital gown. A window looked out over his twin domains: Harvard Square with its bookstores and eateries, its subway plaza thronged with tourists, skateboarders, and assorted counterculture relics; and across Mass. Ave., Harvard Yard, site of the two main college libraries, Widener and Lamont, the latter home to the Poetry Room. Stratis was at his happiest shuttling between these worlds, cultivating relationships among professors and local writers. The consummate flâneur, he was a familiar sight browsing poetry chapbooks in the Grolier Book Store or arguing politics with a Greek compatriot at the Café Algiers. Now, bedridden with appendicitis, he looked diminished, submitting meekly as a nurse logged his vital signs.

      A writer himself, Stratis had published two well-received novels over the past decade and was now embarked on two more, one about Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met as a young man, and the other, a draft of which I brought along on my visits, a surrealistic fantasy set in the Widener basement. He regularly sought my feedback on his writing, a flattering show of trust in an aspiring poet twenty years his junior. My tentativeness about my role was compounded by my reservations about his new work, which struck me as more ambitious and demanding, but also less coherent than his published novels.       Going over my extensive edits and trying to sound more enthusiastic than I felt, I refrained from saying what a successful author least wants to hear: “Why can't you write another version of that book I liked?” Stratis took my comments with equanimity, aware of the challenge he had set himself and glad for literary conversation during his week-long recovery. His absence had left me in charge of the Poetry Room, a reminder of his promise that I would succeed him as curator when he retired.