Pushcart 2026 L: Dana Levin, “Lessons of the Line” (non-fiction) from The Yale Review #112.1

Gary Waters: Illustration of woman reading book near clouds As for craft: I had arrived on campus as a sophomore in 1984 with a love for the music of T. S. Eliot, from his Practical Cats (1939) to “Prufrock,” but then I took a poetry writing class with Miroslav Holub, our Spring Visiting Writer. Holub was a major Czech poet and he was also a doctor — he introduced me to another doctor, an American one, and my poems would never be the same. Immersed in William Carlos Williams, I forsook fusty Eliot and embarked on a prolonged Imagist tear. I associated poetic music with the evils of rhyme and, for one unbearable semester, with the tortures of class exercises in meter with Professor Robert Mezey at Pomona College, Pitzer’s stately sister school. My new mission was image. Image was all! That was how I graduated in 1987: metrically deaf, scarcely conscious of pacing and the line, despite all the poems I had read, despite all the poetry workshops I had taken, despite my own, new, heavily…