1.
“Are you by your machine?” he says.
“Yeah, I’m here.” I turn the phone on speaker, set it on my desk, open a Word doc. By “machine”—I know by now—he just means computer. I don’t think I ever hear him say that word: Computer. I know he did, once, when he told an interviewer in 1989, “About the computers—the university gave me one, but I gave it back.”1 As far as I know, he only touched one once in his life, which ended in the early morning hours of February 20, 2023, after congestive heart failure. Laura Johnson, one of Norman’s former students and a longtime assistant, said that in the early 2000s she tried to teach him how to log in to his email. When Norman sat down in front…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2024