'Warm Song' Remembering Our "Creative Writing Class" at Stanford and our Ed's Place

Stands the Human Being

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'Warm Song' Remembering Our "Creative Writing Class" at Stanford and our Ed's Place

Nothing like a little scare to health (that "heart-attack" of March 23) to add urgency to remembering and addressing those we hold dear. That is, those classmates of 55 years ago.

Don Paul

May 18, 2026

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

	'WARM SONG'

        To a Host who travel round
	To a Place where the Hamm’s sign streams
	Ever up and down,
	Eyes gleam with shouts of delights found
	In the Smokey Dim and Burbling Din 
	Our energies illumined (really),	
	Next to Ed’s Pensioners on their stools,	
	Our elbows up and out. Terrapin!
	Warm Song, Warm Song, 
	The Nights and Mornings Long
	

Well, hoist from our Pitchers 
And the Schooner glasses filled!
Celebrate again our “Class” 
And More (Place people, earlier Stegner Fellows) 
	who “adjourned”
To Ed’s Place—O, hole-in-the-wall Bar 
Beside a Chinese restaurant
Across the street from twin Marquees
Of the Aquarius Theater
In Downtown Palo Alto, 
Late afternoons into nights
Of our 1971-1972 Year at Stanford.

Yay, our Springtime of Successes!
For Winter months before, we regular drinkers
Left Leland’s “Farm”, the Campus vastly spread
With low-slung ’Spanish Colonial Revival’
Department buildings, their sandstone 
Softly red as lands riven by Railroads
During the Americas’ latter 19th-century California,
Serried Arches like Estancia’s,
Palm-Trees lining Lawns beside Undergraduates’ Mercedes,
… The “Farm” and our own privileged
“Class” of scarcely more than one dozen attending,
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00 to 4:00, 
In the 4th-floor Jones Room of Stanford’s Old Library …
We left to drink and talk in our Ed’s Place,
Emerson (no less!) Street, Palo Alto’s Downtown.

We sure were odd! Motley as the
United States, 1971-1972! 
Our Creative Writing “Class” of Fellows—
Wallace Stegner and Edith Meirless, a mere six chosen 
From thousands of international applicants, 
And a likewise special set of Post-Graduate Students.
We gathered for two hours, those
Tuesday and Thursday afternoons,
Around an Oval Table of Mahogany within walls
Book-lined to their ceilings, the fabled 4th-floor
Jones Room of Stanford’s Old Library. 
Within the two decades just past
Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, Evan Connell Jr.,
Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry,
Ken Kesey, Judith Rascoe, Thomas McGuane, 
Jim Harrison, … had read from their Novels and Stories
And talked around this Table!

We were as surely earnest! 1971-1972
In the Americas, Writing mattered
As if we and it might change our Nations’ Cultures
And the world’s swift, Wars-torn turning.
New Journalism! Prose and Poetry
Cut-up to match the speed and shocks
Of Holocausts nuclear and other!
We were costumed to stand out
Like private icons 
Within the whole Earth’s spectacle.

The scarves! The hats! Eyes lit
By reflections and from within.
Look around our Table.
John Zimarowski of Boston,                                                                                                     Locks tumbling to magenta Boa, 
        stories of romance among Cockettes,
April Smith, 21 and from the Northeast too,
Cherry beret, boots calf-high, the
	novelist beginning with what she knew,
Fred Pfiel, Deer-stalker and Pork-pie
Hat and Corn-cob pipe, Road-gangs’ Godot,
Hunt Hawkins, Johns Hopkins Lacrosse, 
Fellow in Tanzania, whose protagonist
	conversed with a Jack-in-the-Box,
Anne West, blouses of flowers matching her 
Henna hair, always inclining toward Concern,
Bert Phillips of Private Schools in Tennessee.
Styronesque musings and sportjackets with
	leather elbows-patches,
Tom Zigal, another 21, open of face, direct in his prose 
As a Texas oil-field hand schooled by 
	Blonde on Blonde and Austin,
Scott Turow of Chicago and Amherst,
Committed, thoughtful, nuanced, like
	the Rent-Strike his novel depicted,
Michael Rogers of Redlands’ southern California, 
Tanned, player of the Flute AND Water Polo, 
	fiction published in Esquire and also young as me,
The ex-Marines Alan Boatman and Robert Roth, 
Both shorter than 5’ 7” and worrying through novels 
	that might make sense of what they’s seen in Vietnam
Glenn Godfrey of Belize in a black-and-gold shirt like silk,
Its lapels wide, and his boyhood of Saturday-afternoon movies
	in the City that carried fragrances of wood and sand,
And Chuck, Chuck Kinder of gol-durn
West Virginia with his big MACK cap
And broad shoulders and fine-wrought Snakehunter,
Companions with me there at the long Table,
My Lee blue jeans, black cowboy-boots, unwashed hair,
Bearing in the breast-pocket of a $1.99 J.C. Penney T-shirt
(Affordable to Cannery-workers and black or red or green)
The additional identity of a pack of Winston cigarettes,
Of which I smoked at least two each Class,
And all of us
Under guidance of the avuncular Professor
“Dick” Scowcroft, considerate yet quick as a cat,
Whose care made us
Name him “Coach” of our ironical
But dear ‘Creative Writing Softball Team’
In the Spring of our successes, 19 and 72.

	To a Host who travel round
	To a Place where the Hamm’s sign streams
	Ever up and down. 
	Eyes gleam with shouts of delights found
	In the Smokey Dim and Burbling Din 
	Our energies illumined (really)	
	Next to Ed’s Pensioners on their stools,	
	Our elbows up and out. Terrapin!
	Warm Song, Warm Song, 
	The Nights and Mornings Long


	May 17, 2026
	With thanks to Tom Zigal for his reminders.
	First drafts 2017 and 2018.