Remembering a Friend I Never “Met”
How can you feel a close connection to someone you’ve never met face-to-face? There was a time when I probably would have told you couldn’t—insisted, in fact—but that was before I “met” Florenz. Way back at the beginning of the marvelous adventure that would become CavanKerry, I had a conference call with Joan and Florenz (it must have been 2000). Here were two strangers from New Jersey calling California with this crazy notion about starting a publishing house devoted to that most non-commercial of genres—poetry! They had been given my name as a potential book publicist to help them launch their dream. So I “signed on,” figuring that a few books later it would all just drift away like so many other well-intentioned publishing ventures have. How wrong could I have been? Over the next thirteen years I worked with Florenz from the West Coast, largely by email, with just the very occasional phone call, helping publicize CavanKerry’s books in one way or another. It proved a special, symbiotic, and long-lasting relationship. Although I knew that Florenz was “of a certain age,” I never imagined that relationship would end. And, I suppose it hasn’t, because I think of her with constant affection, especially when I am reading one of CavanKerry’s forthcoming books. If I have one regret, it is that Florenz was never my editor, because I know what a fine and caring one she was, the kind that every writer dreams of having. I miss this remarkable woman who I never “met” and end with a few lines from “Dido’s Lament,” an unpublished poem of my own:
The soprano sings Remember
me,
her departure not real –
back from the Underworld,
her Aeneas at her side
(the final curtain call) –
Yet who can resist that aching
melody?
—Robert Weibezahl
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