Oh, can’t you see
Oh, you misjudge me
I look like a farmer
But I’m a lover
Can’t judge a book
By looking at the cover
—Bo Diddley
Authors are often either famously disappointed by the covers of their books or taken by surprise by, in fact, how much they like them. I feel as if I’ve been lucky from the start in having at least some part in each cover that was used. Let me mention only two of my book covers, the first, Hush, and the most recent, my twelfth collection, Prayer for My Daughter.
My first full book of poems, Hush, was accepted by Jon Galassi, who’d just taken over the newly-revived Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series. Jon was quick to tell me that the cover format for the series was to have a picture of the poet on the cover—not just “on” the cover, but as the full cover.
In 1975, I’d just moved to Oberlin to begin teaching and I didn’t know anyone who might take a photograph that might be use. Then, I discovered that one of my fiction writing students, Peter Ruchman—clearly older by several years, wiser, hipper and more experienced than any of the others in his cohort—had for a while worked in New York as the assistant to the portrait photographer, Arnold Newman. I asked Peter if he was up for this book cover gig and he just laughed, saying, Sure, so we set a midday time the next Saturday for him to come by my barely moved-into place.
I was living in an apartment at the edge of Oberlin that had come totally unfurnished. Two of my colleagues who were married and upgrading their home furniture generously gave me a wonderful old settee they’d been storing, adding to it a small round wood table with two wooden chairs. Except for a mattress I’d tossed into the one bedroom, that settee, table and chairs were the only furniture in that apartment.
When Peter arrived with his very beautiful, professional camera, I knew I was in good hands. I saw that he had an open shoe box with twenty-four rolls of thirty-six exposure black-and-white film. Peter had also brought a case of beer that he put down on the small round wood table. Twenty-four rolls of film and twenty-four cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Peter was clearly a professional. He was also a brilliant storyteller and for almost an hour we just laughed and swapped stories and drank beer. I could see him watching me through his tinted glasses as we talked and finally realized he wanted me to be, well, extremely relaxed but not yet actually drunk. He gave me a nod and I stood up, sort of, a little wobbly and put on my one sport coat, a brown corduroy all-purpose disguise I could pull out for any emergency. I was also wearing one of the plain sweater-vests I wore in the mid-70s because I was a guy from California who was always cold in Iowa and Ohio.
I managed the dozen steps from the table to the settee and sat back. Peter, standing, began moving to different angles, taking shots continuously as we kept on telling stories. He’d ask me to move slightly or change positions slightly, all the while periodically removing the used rolls and quickly loading new rolls of film. There was an incredible grace and ease as he moved, and the action was simply part of the continuum of his shifts of focus. After almost an hour, he nodded and said, “Ok, I know we’ve got something good here.”
A few days later, Peter came back with the proof sheets. I was amazed to see that, in the photographs Peter had taken, I was able to recognize myself as myself. I looked relaxed (no surprise) but present. The worn settee looked elegant, and no one could ever have guessed it was a lonely settee in that bare room. In the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph, the one we’d selected to send on to Houghton Mifflin, sat (half in view) a single Pabst Blue Ribbon can. It’s now forty-eight years since Hush was first published, yet I still have people coming up after a reading to praise the totemic presence of that Pabst can.
*
From June 2023 through July 2024, I lived in Richmond, Virginia; for most of that time, I lived in a stone cottage just below a bend of the James River. Most of my books were in storage, but I had facsimile copies of three of Yeats’ most famous books: The Wild Swans at Coole; The Tower; and The Winding Stair. At nineteen, at Fresno State College, in my poetry classes with Philip Levine and my British Lit classes with a wonderful professor, Stanley Poss, I’d spent the year immersed in Yeats’s work. Four years later, a graduate class with Gayatri Spivak on Baudelaire, Yeats, Mallarmé and Rilke engraved in me a lifelong connection of those poets.
The covers of those three Yeats books were all designed by his friend, the poet, writer and artist, Sturge Moore, who was a superb wood engraver. Moore’s cover designs for Yeats’s books remain, for me, some of the most moving and powerful I’ve ever seen.
In February of 2024, I had a conversation with a longtime friend, scholar and professor Theresia de Vroom, publisher of the new, independent Walton Well Press, based in Los Angeles and Oxford. We discussed the possibility of me joining the press before their October 2024 press launch. I’d just revised, for its final time, a new manuscript of poems, Prayer For My Daughter. The title poem, of course, echoes Yeats’s famous poem of the same title. Theresia asked if there was anything that I might like if I joined her new press. I said, “I’ve always wanted a book that looks a hundred years old. I’d love to have a book that looks like one of Sturge Moore’s designs for Yeats.” Later that day, Theresia texted to say she had an early edition copy of The Wild Swans at Coole on its way to her and that her designer, Ash Good, would be able to use this at the basis for the cover of Prayer For My Daughter.
It is impossible to describe how appropriate and intimate this cover is; I could never have imagined a striking book. A friend noted the way, in Sturge Moore’s design, a parent swan seems to be hovering above and guarding over a younger swan below, in flight. The poem, Prayer for My Daughter, is the poem closest to me of all my poems. The book is filled with elegies and departures, losses and reflections, passages of illness. The union of this book and its cover has become, to me, the folding of one long-held dream upon another.
David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including both the Rome Fellowship and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize for teaching and poetic achievement from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque.