Sun 8/15/2004 6:49 PM

Sent via the form at laura.moncur.org

Yes, he is alive. He is a remarkably good person and an extraordinary friend. He is kind. He is compassionate.

He has written many, many poems. Some of them are the best I have ever read (and I have an MFA in Poetry, so I have read at least a few really good poems). Once, he wrote a poem for me and read it on NPR.

I would be happy to put you in touch with him if you like and if it is okay with him.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Peace, Tobie

Sun 8/15/2004 8:53 PM

Sent via the form at laura.moncur.org

I can give you a five sentence bio of a five thousand word one depending upon your patience. But you must know that there are other worlds than the internet or web sites. No one ever asked me, by the way, if they could use that quote, which was originally a poem in the Nation Magazine, NYC, although it has been widely anthologized, and was just translated into Japanese. I’m off to the horse races tomorrow; then golf on Tuesday so I’ll sign off for now. Peace and all good things to you and ours. Bill

Tue 8/17/2004 8:38 AM

Sent via the form at laura.moncur.org

I didn’t go to the races yesterday but would have bet on anything close to Laura, a woman of exquisite taste. And oh, yes, amazon.com does have a new book of mine (though the world of old books is a million times more interesting (and amazon.com doesn’t have a clue). It’s listed simply as Poems: A Collection, by William Claire. Forget the F. If you buy one, you will not be disappointed. Besides having my undying devotion, you will get some astonishing freebies that are priceless. By the way, you seem like a wonderful writer yourself. William

Tue 8/17/2004 2:46 PM

Mr. Claire,

Thank you so much for responding to my entry. You’re right. There is a world outside of the Internet and web sites. I find that it is slowly replacing the library for me. Someday in the future, I feel that if it’s not on the Internet, it won’t exist.

You and Tobie stumbled upon my personal online journal (weblog or blog, for short), but Mike and I run a Quotations website (http://www.quotationspage.com/). It is the oldest quotations website on the Internet, which means that we put it up in 1994, which is young in the publishing world, but old as the hills on the Internet. We started it as an educational site and it has survived all the commercial sites. We have a page for each author and we would love a brief paragraph biography to put on your page. It’s the closest thing to a fan site that you have.

Regarding permission to quote: we usually leave the quotes up unless the author or the copyright holder complains. If you wish to be off the list, that is fine with us and we will remove you from our site. Just drop us a line and we’ll change it however you like. Additionally, if there are other quotations from your work that you would like to see on our site, we’d be happy to put them up.

You should really consider setting up a web page for yourself. It’s something that could be done very simply using one of the free sites like LiveJournal.com. I think you would be surprised at the response that you would receive from fans and the illiterate alike.

There are so many times when we get email for people trying to contact Andy Rooney or some other person that we’ve quoted. If you got a higher ranking than us on the Google search, then you would get that email instead of us. It’s always fun to receive fan mail, don’t you think?

I’m so glad you’re alive and well. You should really look into setting up an online journal. It’s so invigorating to publish your work every day to an awaiting public. It makes writing so much more interactive.

Hope to hear from you soon! Laura Moncur