In my non-Nabokovian life, I have served as president of the Worcester County (Massachusetts) Poetry Association, whose members just received an announcement--which, I hasten to add, I had nothing to do with--that "Charles Pratt has agreed to read at the Annual Meeting. A poet in the tradition of Robert Frost and John Shade, he has taught at Philips Exeter and has been an apple grower." Such an allusion is especially pleasing, I think, in the context of the recently published facsimile edition of Shade's Pale Fire.