I share everyone's sadness at Burt's passing: it's a tremendous human and intellectual loss for this community and for the larger poetry community.  Aside from twenty-plus years of professional friendship and conversation about modernism, the Objectivists, and contemporary poetry, he also became in recent years a most generous "cancer buddy" to me when my own diagnosis followed his by just a year or two.  Long phone calls and e-mails marked by his characteristic combination of kindness, patience, and determination.   He listened to people as he listened to poetry, with deep care and attention.  It was a pleasure to catch up in person at the Venice Pound conference and, knowing his illness was advancing, to see him doing what he loved in a place he loved: enjoying dinner with Virginia and friends, lively conversation.  How different our field (and our world) would look without his commitment and influence: imagine no NPF, Orono conferences, Paideuma, Sagetrieb, none of those sage, rigorous, capacious essays.  One forgot that they remained ungathered, because Burt seemed such a central, large (in all senses!) presence anyway.  As I write, I have next to me the 53-page Pound essay that he sent just a few months ago--he never quit!

Alan Golding