Poems

Sometimes they were scrawled on loose-leaf notebook paper. Others were written on the back of police watch sheets or on Baltimore police stationery. But the poems Lawerence E. Mize Sr. brought home show what he was contemplating during long midnight patrol shifts in West Baltimore: how much he loved his wife, Sandy. Now Mize has published these poems and others in a slim volume titled "Thoughts of You: Poems on Life, Love, and Family. " In the introduction to his book, the Southwest Baltimore native describes the first time he ever saw Sandy, who lived across the street, while she was playing badminton with her sister.

Recently, a poem by Dulaney High School senior Minwei Cao was selected to be included in the "Building Bridges to Celebrate our Global Village" anthology. A student competition to write essays and poems about cultural diversity for the anthology was sponsored by World Artists Experiences, a nonprofit group that promotes worldwide mutual understanding and cross-cultural interaction. The title of Minwei's poem was "Please Do Not Misunderstand. " In it, she writes of the need to strive for a universal language free of hate and prejudice "that will roll off the tongue like water/ smooth and soft/ lovely and peaceful.

A 41-year-old Ellicott City woman, whose violent slaying prompted a national search for her estranged husband, was an introverted poet who dedicated her life to her children and expected a bright new year without her spouse, friends said.Shirley Scott Harney's fractured and bullet-ridden body was found by police outside her home in the 5000 block of Brampton Parkway Dec. 26.Her husband was in custody last night in Charlotte, N.C. His sons were found unharmed.Neighbors said they knew little about Mrs. Harney.

Friends and former classmates gathered Saturday at Johns Hopkins University to remember Anne Smedinghoff, a Foreign Service officer who was killed in a bombing in Afghanistan earlier this month, sharing stories of a too-short life marked by adventure. As photographs of Smedinghoff in front of monuments and ruins around the world flashed by on projector screens, friends recalled her various escapades, including a coast-to-coast cycling trip, which saw the young woman eat a live bug to fulfill an item on a scavenger hunt list.

Keisha Miles' poem "No One Seems to Hear Me" has a long way to go -- at least 4 million miles.Keisha, a seventh-grader at Roland Park Middle School, is one of four young poets whose work has been selected for display inside the Mass Transit Administration's fleet of 850 buses.Through the Poetry Express program, supported by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, Keisha can share some of her most private thoughts. "I'm glad people can [see] my poetry and understand the way I think, because I'm really shy and nervous," she says.

Donald Richardson is a man of many roles.Not only is he an English professor at Anne Arundel Community College and a faculty adviser for the college newspaper, he is also a poet in residence for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders at St. Jane Frances School in Riviera Beach.For the past week, Mr. Richardson, 50, has taught the youngsters different forms and components of poetry -- that it is more than rhyme schemes and haiku. Today, the students will honor the Pasadena resident with a reading of their works.

Twelve students from Friendship Valley Elementary School squelched their enthusiasm about graduating from the fifth grade long enough to share their poetry in front of a full house at the Carroll County Arts Council Gallery last night.The pupils opened up "First Thursday," an evening of poetry, music and art sponsored each month at the gallery in Westminster by One Tree Productions and Common Ground on the Hill.Joining the youngsters were Sykesville poet Kathleen Adcock, musician Amy Ferebee and her partner, Steve Snyder.

Many students read and write poetry in high school, but Pikesville poet Kendra Kopelke wants young people to listen to poetry, as well. "Poems are kind of an odd encounter with words," she said. "To hear them out loud is really different." As the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society's poet-in- residence, Kopelke will read and discuss her poetry in every Howard County High school between October and April. One of her messages is that hearing a poet read his or her work is as valuable as talking about themes, meters and line breaks.

A pizza is a pizza and nothing more, unless one considers it a metaphor. Then, who knows? In the hands of a poet, a pizza -- boxed and resting on the bed of a Motel 6, let's say -- marks a vacant place in the heart. As Baltimore poet Matt Hohner put it:I climb into bed. A warm spotwas left behind by the pizza box where you are not.Hohner was on the road in Oregon that spring of 1995, thinking of his girlfriend. She was back home in Baltimore. Hohner was heading to graduate school at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The sun descends behind the mountains. ... The moon floats like a silver boat through the blue lake of heaven. ... My heart is still and awaits its hour. ... " Such imagery of leave-taking, drawn from ancient Chinese poetry, inspired one of the greatest works of Western music, Gustav Mahler's The Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde), for vocal soloists and orchestra. Those particular lines are from The Farewell (Der Abschied), the final movement, which, at more than 30 minutes, takes up half of this piece from 1909.

Former Maryland poet laureate Lucille Clifton was a former "Jeopardy" champion who used a Ouija board to communicate with her dead mother. She was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who as an adult unabashedly celebrated her physical self. And in the newly released, 720-page volume of her collected poems, Clifton writes about cancer and racism and motherhood and her hips. "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010" includes a foreword by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.

A new book celebrates the career of former Maryland poet laureate Lucille Clifton , including her thoughts on topics from Sunday dinner to cancer, her hips to racism. In the Baltimore Sun, Mary McCauley highlights “The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010,” which includes a foreword by Toni Morrison. McCauley offers a Q&A with poet Michael Glaser, who co-edited the book with Kevin Young, curator of the Emory University archives where Clifton's papers are held.

Rose Mayr's former boyfriend, Boris Gamazaychikov, wrote a poem about the young woman, who was killed in a train derailment shortly before midnight Tuesday. "Sometimes I imagined we would grow old together. But now I'll grow old and you'll stay young in my heart forever. And I couldn't ever see you stuck behind a picket fence. You were too busy looking at the sky and the horizon to which it led. "Remember when we climbed to the top of the earth, through the bushes and the thorns we were covered in dirt.

Marie Rose Cornely, a homemaker who enjoyed writing poetry, died Sunday of heart disease at Stella Maris Hospice. She was 87. Marie Rose McKenna was born and raised in Philadelphia. She was a 1943 graduate of the Academy of Notre Dame de Namur in Villanova, Pa. She was an office worker before her 1947 marriage to Dr. Donald A. Cornely Sr.. The couple lived in Philadelphia when Dr. Cornely taught at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the University of Pittsburgh.

A handwritten draft of one of Edgar Allan Poe's earliest poems and a letter to author Washington Irving are among a handful of items that will be part of an exhibit opening April 26 at a Richmond, Va., museum devoted to the writer. "This is the kind of exhibit that comes around only once in a generation," Chris Semtner, curator of Richmond's Edgar Allan Poe Museum, said of "From Poe's Quill: The Letters and Manuscripts of Edgar Allan Poe," which will run through July 11. "Because Poe's manuscripts were not highly valued during his brief life, many have been lost or dispersed over time, making them very rare today.

Baltimore-born poet Adrienne Rich , whose poetry and essays were the foundations of modern feminism, has died at age 82. Here are some tidbits from her life here, as reflected in stories from The Sun: Rich's father, a physician and professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, used to give her poems to copy, and she was exposed to many of the great poets early in life. She was a member of the Roland Park Country School Class of 1947. In the essay "Taking Women Students Seriously," published in her book" On Lies, Secrets and Silence," she wrote of the school: "We were taken to libraries, art museums, lectures ... given extra French or Latin reading.

Almost everyone knows a snippet of Dorothy Parker's tart poetry. Her advice to the lovelorn, for example: "Candy is dandy But liquor is quicker." Or, perhaps ... "Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses." Lots of people love the short stories by the brilliant, brittle and erratic Mrs. Parker of the Algonquin Round Table, stories like "The Big Blonde," "A Telephone Call," "Diary of a New York Lady" and a couple dozen more. Lots of her admirers can recite great swaths of her longer poems, such as "Resume."

Adrianna Amari is a pianist, photographer, psychologist, peacenik and poet. Now, the faculty member with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has assembled a book of poetry by Daniel Berrigan, the longtime antiwar activist who was convicted of burning draft records in the celebrated "Catonsville Nine" case. She placed the highly evocative poems side-by-side with dozens of haunting photographs of cemeteries that she had taken during the decade before she lost her vision as a result of an aneurysm.

Adrienne Rich, one of the country's most honored and influential poets, whose finely tuned verse explored her identity as a feminist, a lesbian and an agent for political change, died Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82. She died of complications from rheumatoid arthritis, said her son, Pablo Conrad. In more than 60 years as a published poet, Ms. Rich examined the evolving lives of women in modern society and embodied many of those changes herself. She was a precocious child of a privileged Baltimore family, then a young wife and mother, and later dedicated herself to the ideals of feminism.

Children's author Elissa Brent Weissman is kicking off a new set of classes for the Baltimore Young Writers' Group, for kids 8 to 13. Students meet twice a month, Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., to learn about writing stories and poems. The schedule is January 21, 28; February 11, 25; March 10, 24 at School 33 Art Center , 1427 Light St. in Baltimore. For more information or to register, visit www.ebweissman.com/classes Meanwhile, the Baltimore Department of Recreation and Parks is soliciting entries for the Senior Citizens Poetry Contest 2012.