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Tribute to David Kopaska-Merkel on the SFPA Blog

My relationship with David KM (KM like TM, the symbol for trademark?) has always been in the ‘pen pal’ category.

He and I both were professionals. Scientists. We could bond over fossils, then he could decline to purchase my poems in the next email. No harm, no foul.

My early correspondence with him is lost in the way whole servers can be lost, in the way domains in that earlier era of the inter-webs can cease to exist overnight. (Interred webs?)

What I have is two sets — the decade-ago last gasps as I tried to resurrect my poetic identity from an e-mail server loss (all gone) and first one dead computer, then another (srsly!) that happened to coincide with one of the busiest moments of my scientific career (PhDs kill computers — this is a known effect).

I’ve shared the best of our correspondence from this past spring in the SFPA blog — correspondence in relation to my purchase of a lifetime of dreams — catalogue of the extant issues of four decades of David’s publication — Dreams & Nightmares.

What you don’t have are the prior e-mails I had with him, and the funny/absurd moment when he almost bought/rejected — then retracted that rejection to print “Ariadne’s Thread” on the back cover of DN 92. It was affirmation that I’m a (decent enough) spec poet at a time when I felt that piece of me was being cannibalized by science.

His acceptance meant more to me than he ever will know.

He also wished me luck on my defense. That was 2012.

Thank you, David. I passed.

…

Epilogue:

This is by far my favorite of the D&N covers, calligraphy by Morgan Kopaska-Merkel to mark the 35th year of D&N. Sublime. And the names! OMG the beautiful, familiar names.