Henry Dieterich
Home: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Family: Wife (m. June 2006); My daughter, who works in theater in Chicago; 3 grown stepchildren and 6 step-grandchildren
Work: Retired
Vocation: Teaching history, although there is no place for me to exercise it right now
Religion: Roman Catholic; member of Christ the King Catholic Church and Word of Life, an ecumenical Christian community
If you want to know more about me, explore this site and read the blog.
About the name of the site
When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot of bad poetry. What can I say? It was the sixties; everybody thought he could write poetry. My taste and critical faculties soon outpaced my ability, and I gave it up in sheer embarrassment. When I was a senior in high school (February 1969, to be exact) I wrote a poem that contained the following lines:
I am a wooden gargoyle
in the land of brick
in the city of chalk;
naked,
like a plumbline in the wind,
upside-down in Cancer's green
and liquid eye.
I must have been very taken with the phrase, because, when I embarked upon a project (never consummated) to publish a little book of my work, the title I intended for it was Plumbline in the Wind. I even commissioned my college roommate, a very skilled artist, to design a cover. This is the result:
