When the word was grapevine-circulated that H. R. Stoneback, Founding Editor of the Shawangunk Review in 1989, would say farewell to this journal after 30 years, poems arrived on the editorial desk from poets who had published poems in this review in the last decade or two. A few of these poems—by New Paltz MAs (and former TAs)—are published here. Thirty years is a good run. Although certain restrictions in the review’s charter prevented sales of or subscriptions to the journal, some issues attracted international attention and featured previously unpublished work by America’s leading writers–see, e.g. Volume XVII (Spring 2006), the 261-page issue that included manuscripts, letters and a previously unpublished short story by Robert Penn Warren; see also the “Best of SR” issue published as the 20th Anniversary Issue (Fall 2009—no Volume Number); and, over the decades that I worked with my esteemed co-editor Daniel Kempton, numerous issues that included writers of national and international renown. And along with such writers, this review has always featured the work of our graduate students. To them, I say the warmest Hail and Farewell.

      And the other ave atque vale here pertains to my previously unannounced retirement from the English Department. When I joined the department at SUNY New Paltz (a place I had never heard of) in 1969, I intended to stay a few years and then return to Vanderbilt University. But I discovered that SUNY New Paltz was an extraordinary place, with superb (and sometimes joyfully eccentric) faculty and students, and I stayed. And stayed. Fifty years is a good run. My elder brother, a somewhat skeptical scientist, recently retired at age 77, tells me: “You know, when they start saluting you with all these Honoring H. R. Stoneback  special sessions at your national conventions and conferences, maybe they’re really just saying you’re 65 now, it’s time to go and they’ve been doing those sessions for you for at least a dozen years now. So, what are they telling you?”  My Aunt Maggie founded the Gray Panthers, coined the word Age-ism, and from podiums as varied as the cover of TIME magazine and the Johnny Carson Show my Aunt Maggie Kuhn deployed her extraordinary wit and style to rail against the word and concept of retirement and related issues. My grandfather, who worked every day until he was 85, in the good Old Code World, advised me: “Find a good place and a good job, serve it loyally and work hard for 50 years, then take the Gold Pocket Watch, skip all the speeches, and hit the road.” Well, the only gold I’m likely to see these days is faux-champagne in a plastic flute, and innyhow (as we say in Kentucky) a gold watch would just quit working in my pocket. So, with plenty of experience at hitting the road, I’ll just hit the time-stopped road again.

    The word retirement means nothing to me. One of my personal mottoes is the phrase that echoed over the battlefields of The Great War:  Retreat, hell! We just got here. But there are many books-in-progress to finish, many already scheduled future keynote addresses to write, many places still to see and be. So I say to a university and a department, to colleagues and students I have loved–Hail and Farewell. Je vous salue. And to my students of all the years, see you at the next conference. (And the one after that.) Make your conference abstracts clean and tight, write a good title, and get them in on deadline.

“Thank you,” the old man said. He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride (The Old Man and the Sea).

I am not Hemingway’s Santiago but I am a fisherman and I have spent a lot of time recently on ships and the high seas, from Antarctica to Tahiti, from the Falkland Islands to the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Middle East. And I say “Thank you,” with that unmentionable h-word that carries no loss of true pride.

     I have been persuaded that it is not unseemly to close out this issue, and this career, with a few dedicated poems by former students, and with one more portrait by Everett Raymond Kinstler. This issue, after all, pays homage to Kinstler’s art. And to my students. I think my old colleague Michel Foucault—at the University of Paris in the early 70s his desk was across from mine in a large open-space office—was wrong when he said we write in order to have no face. (Although, knowing Foucault, I could see why he would say that.) Personally, I prefer to leave faces to painters. Many art critics say Kinstler paints souls. Many of his famous subjects say Kinstler makes us look better than we do. Shunning mirrors, I wouldn’t know, on either score. I could say that Kinstler’s portrait is proof that I have grown old and gray in service to the SUNY-New Paltz English Department. But then, who’s old—I just celebrated my 39th birthday. Again. (And soon enough 39 x 2.) So let’s just leave it at this: ave atque vale . . . Retraite, the French word for retirement, looks and sounds like “retreat.” Retraite, hell! I just got here. And there.