Hillary and I used to meet up at the Free Speech Movement Cafe in the mornings to read and workshop each other’s newest poems. We did this for about a year. And during that year, Hillary taught me to think about how a poem teaches a reader the way it wants to be read early on, so that, by the end, the poem can achieve formal and conceptual complexities that wouldn’t have been possible earlier on. This idea became the seed crystal not only of many of my poetic experiments, but also of the way I came to read and teach Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Hillary lived in that overlap between poetry writing and literary criticism, and she invited so many people to join her there.
– Eleanor Johnson