Poems

The universe — the one surrounding Max Ehrmann's poem "Desiderata" — is now unfolding as it should. With Thursday afternoon's dedication of the statue and plaza honoring the late poet, the center of the "Desiderata" universe shifted from Baltimore to the corner of Seventh and Wabash in Ehrmann's hometown. And folks in both cities couldn't be happier. With Ehrmann's descendants, guests and an estimated 600 other Terre Hauteans watching, sculptor Bill Wolfe and arts advocate Mary Kramer unveiled the lifesize, bronze likeness of the man who wrote one of the world's best-known poems.

LONDON -- It was a dark and stormy night . . . .And it was worse down in the Tube: clammy, drafty, then suffocating. The rush-hour clack of heels rang down the dripping steps; bodies squeezed into the subway cars and crushed one against the other, unhappy faces all around in 180 degrees of misery.The lucky few hung from straps. The rest were held up by the pressure of body against body, all swaying as the train pushed the stale subterranean air through the inky tunnel, lurching from station to station.

"Ever since I took to writing poems seriously," Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky tells us, "I've tried to write a poem every Christmas -- as a sort of birthday greeting." The first, "Christmas Ballad," was written in 1962, and the last, "Flight Into Egypt (2)," in 1995, the year before Brodsky's death. The poems about the birth of Jesus -- 18 in all -- fill the recently published Nativity Poems. While the Nobel laureate is the translator of a few of his poems, most of them are rendered by distinguished contemporary poets, including Anthony Hecht, Paul Muldoon, Richard Wilbur, Glyn Maxwell and Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott.

Recently, John Thanos was sentenced to die for the second time. But a person can only die once. Not very long ago I had to make a decision that might have affected that first death sentence. I've been thinking about it ever since.Because I am outspoken opponent of the death penalty and have logged decades of work with incarcerated writers, I was asked by public defenders to read John Thanos's poems, written from prison, and decide whether or not they had "literary merit."I decided that they did not.I didn't make my decision alone.

By the time I entered the College of Notre Dame in the early 1960s, Sister Maura Eichner was already well known. Author of several books of poetry, she was friends with important literary figures like Flannery O'Connor, Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur - connections that were unusual for a woman teacher in the '60s - to say nothing of a nun garbed in a long black habit and veil. I had applied to be an English major with a writing concentration. This required a portfolio and a meeting with the department chair, Sister Maura.

While studying law in Annapolis, the young man's thoughts often turned to his family in Pipe Creek, then in Frederick County, and to Delia, the girl he left behind. In his poems, he wrote of Delia's "Witching smile and her dewy lip." He wrote of the beech tree "on whose trunk [his] faithful vows appear." Or he punned his name, hoping he could unlock the treasures of Delia's heart. He never did.Nor did Francis Scott Key ever become well-known for his poetry, although he wrote many poems about everything from love to religion, to riddles, to the pleasures of White Sulphur Springs, where he vacationed.

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.

Just below the surface of awareness in Baltimore, words and emotions coaslesce into something quite incredible: the local poetry scene. Who is emerging as Poetry Month 2003 begins? Fittingly, the first poem in Elizabeth Spires' new book, Now The Green Blade Rises (Norton, 80 pages, $21.95), chronicles a visit to Robert Frost's Ripton, Vt., cabin. Not only does this poem harbinger the Frostian influence within many of her poems (in particular "Two Chairs on a Hillside"), but in its ending lines -- The wind, / is picking up, moving the trees softly to whisper, Ssshh!

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.

Credit David Lehman for piloting what has become, since 1988, an annual fest of American poetry, though neither you nor the poets included should be misled by this being the best there is. Each year, a prominent poet, with Mr. Lehman's assistance, navigates the rocky waters of literary magazines (not books) to choose, from thousands of poems, 75 for enshrinement. In addition, there are some 40 to 50 pages of biographies and comments by poets on their poems (pages that could have been better put to printing poems)