Crossing Paths with the Poet of the Sun

Crossing Paths with the Poet of the Sun is a true story about the friendship between a college student and his professor, a highly published poet of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance, Tracy Thompson. The story begins in 1967 when the two met and became friends, a friendship which continued until 1981, the year Tracy died. Using many of Tracy's poems and letters from their correspondence, the author relates how Tracy encouraged his writing and created a personal literary curriculum for him over a period of several years. The book also presents a unique view of tumultuous '60s and early '70s, first at a college in Boise, Idaho, then in San Francisco, and finally in Flagstaff, Arizona where the author and Tracy explored the beautiful Northern Arizona landscape, visited tribal elders, explored ancient ruins, and attended Native American ceremonies. The book describes not only the numerous literary writers Tracy and the author read and discussed together, but describes their own exploration of nature, the people they met, and their efforts to use the creative arts to see the world in a much deeper way, a world they saw at the time as being fragmented and divided. In their search for a way to heal, they looked back to ancient cultures and traditions, ranging from Buddhism to Taoism, from Native beliefs to Zen meditation, and in their reading read authors as diverse as W.B.Yeats, Arthur Koestler, D.H.Lawrence, Alan Watts, Herman Hesse, Carl Jung, and many others. Crossing Paths with the Poet of the Sun focuses mostly on the time Tracy and the author spent in Northern Arizona, with each of book's twenty chapters named after the places they visited, and the ideas they shared there. The book is both a memoir of the author and a way to memorialize a talented poet few people have heard of, even though at the time he was the most widely published poet of the "Little Magazine" movement during the early sixties. It also, from the author's view, shows how a life can be transformed by the people we meet, and how a single teacher can change permanently the way we see the world.