While John Berryman was on the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, W. D. Snodgrass, the original confessional poet, was one of the members of his class.

I have been very fortunate twice in my career as a student of poetry,” William Dickey wrote in Ed Dinger’s Seems Like Old Times, “first to have been at Reed College as an undergraduate with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, second to have been in John Berryman’s extraordinary and intense poetry workshop with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Paul Petrie, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, Henri Coulette.