I came to Joseph Brodsky's work via his good friend Mikhail Baryshnikov, about whom I frequently wrote in my capacity as a freelance dance critic before enrolling in the M.A. English program at Southwest Texas State. In 1991, when Mr. Brodsky was Poet Laureate, I read his "Immodest Proposal"' suggesting that poetry, like the Bible, should be placed in every hotel nightstand in America-and in factory lunchrooms, doctors' offices, airports, anywhere people had time to kill. Although whimsically made, the suggestion was taken seriously by Andrew Carroll, then an undergraduate at Columbia, who contacted Mr. Brodsky and, with the poet's support, founded the non-profit American Poetry and Literacy Project, of which I am now Assistant Director. To date, the APL project has given away over 30,000 volumes of poetry. Knowing of my position with the Project and that my master's thesis, then in progress, compared aspects of Mr. Brodsky's poetry with Robert Frost's, the SWT Department of English invited Mr. Brodsky to be their Lindsey Lecture Series guest, 2-3 November 1995-or approximately ten weeks before his death in January 1996.