Talk And Reading At Dulwich College

The man to your right is Raymond Chandler, creator of Marlowe, the greatest noir detective in the English crime canon. Chandler has always been one of my true loves, as a stylist, and I rank him with Fitzgerald and Nabokov in that department.

Chandler attended, as a boy, Dulwich College, the famous public school in England, which was founded by a close friend of Marlowe's (the dramatist, not the gumshoe). So it was a delight for me to be invited to attend Dulwich on Friday, by the Literary Society, to give a talk on poetry in the 21st century, and then, later in the day, read my poems for half an hour in the Old Library, as the dark came in through the (yes) high windows (a Chandler image before it was borrowed by Larkin).

I was the guest of the fine English poet Jonathan Ward, who teaches there. We both agreed that some of the chestnut trees on the grounds require poems, especially at twilight.

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