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What embodied the Wick Poetry Center for me was the small library in the Wick series of offices. A cozy room in a rather dull building, the Wick library was a secure refuge, the kind of place you'd enjoy bringing a favorite book to. The bookshelves full of works of poetry, much of it Wick's own publications, give a sense of Wick's long history. We used to have weekly meetings in there. Maggie would bring her coffee and her smile, David would wear his orange pants, Alice would laugh numerous times. What always got me was that, underneath the comfortable benches, were hidden compartments in which you could find more Wick books. I could never find the secret passage in that room, but I knew it was there.
The Wick Center was my immersion into poetry. Though an English major, it wasn't until I worked for Wick for two years as an Assistant and Fellow that I had an inkling of understanding of what poetry might be about. Wick gave me an appreciation for -- among other things -- the performance of poetry readings and poetry composition. I shocked myself when I took Maggie's poetry writing class, but that class convinced me that we miss something in our reading of poetry -- and indeed any kind of writing -- when we don't attempt writing it ourselves.
Wick was my gateway into many of my current activities as a doctoral student. I wouldn't have been able to work with the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org) if it wasn't for Wick. I wouldn't be writing a dissertation on readings of Dante's Divine Comedy in the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Nor would I be able to competently teach poetry to my undergraduate students.
The many Wick books that I have now, sitting on my bookshelves remind me of the Wick Center experience. They remind me of that little Wick library, and of the hidden passages I still might find.
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