"Our 30 Year Old Friendship": Letters from Louise Bogan to Mildred Weston - Tapa dura

This book celebrates the works and days of two significant women of letters, one from "back East, " the other from the Inland Northwest. Both have birthdays in August: the centennial of Louise Bogan's birth is August 11, 1997; Mildred Weston celebrates her ninety-second birthday on August 3, 1997. Poet and critic Louise Bogan lived at the epicenter of the nation's literary life for the three decades spanned by this collection of letters and postcards from New York, Seattle, Chicago and Arkansas, to her friend in Spokane, the poet and teacher, Mildred Weston. Since Miss Weston's share of this correspondence is not available, the young poet Beth Oakes visited her at her home in the Spokane suburbs. From their conversations, which took place on many afternoons in the spring and summer of 1995, Ms. Oakes has distilled Miss Weston's commentary on what Louise Bogan refers to in her last letter, written shortly before her death, as "our 30 year old friendship."

MILDRED WESTON was born in 1905, in Waterville, in the Big Bend country of Washington State. She received her Master of Arts degree from Gonzaga in 1951. Miss Weston's poems have appeared in such publications of Stanford University's Pacific Spectator; the University of Nebraska's Prairie Schooner; the University of Washington's Poetry Northwest; and the University of Oregon's Northwest Review and The New York Times Book Review. She has published several books of poetry including The Green Dusk (1987), Individual Weather (1991), and Idiom (1994). Her research on Vachel Lindsay has made her one of the region's authorities on that poet, as exemplified in her biography Vachel Lindsay: Poet in Exile.

Our gratitude for the impeccable lyricism of her poetry is boundless; but when we tell her so, she demurs, and reminds us with her inimitable smile that few if any poets can boast of two places dedicated in their names--Mildred Weston Hall, the Faculty-Administration building at Fort Wright College (now Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute), and the Mildred Weston Studio in the new Art building of Gonzaga University.