Poet Laureate

Mark Strand, the 1990-1991 American poet laureate and former winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," will join the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University as a senior professor of poetry in July 1994.Mr. Strand's appointment was a significant addition to the Writing Seminars, the second-oldest university writing department in the country (it was founded in 1947; the University of Iowa's began in 1939).A professor at the University of Utah since 1981, Mr. Strand, 59, has won numerous awards, including the MacArthur grant in 1987 and the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry this year.

When Maryland poet laureate Michael Glaser seeks inspiration for his verse, he looks no further than the two-part thumping of his own heart. That's true of Glaser's chosen subject; in his most recent book of verse, 2004's Being a Father, he chronicles the ambivalent emotions that arise while raising his three sons and two daughters, now all grown. The poems tackle experiences as diverse as comforting a preschooler after a nightmare, to a daughter's confident first visit home from college.

If Robert Hass ever writes a poem about jet lag, he won't lack inspiration.Mr. Hass, the eighth and probably most traveled U.S. poet laureate will be the guest of the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo) Tuesday and Wednesday during his Columbia tour, where he'll read to the public, students and the Rotary Club.It will be his only stop in the Baltimore area, despite a schedule that has him hop-scotching across the country at least twice a month.Chronic jet lag may be his biggest malady.

CISCO, Texas - The letter arrived last year on the day before Easter, and not a moment too soon. Cleatus Rattan, 67, had pretty much concluded he was a failure. More than three decades of reluctantly teaching language arts at Cisco Junior College, two dozen years of running a small cattle ranch that he had to shut down, a quarter-century of writing poems more often rejected than accepted by obscure journals - these things compared unfavorably, he felt, with the accomplishments of his nearest and dearest.

When Ebenezer Cooke hands a letter of introduction to Lord Baltimore in John Barth's historical farce, The Sot-Weed Factor, Baltimore notices that it is signed Ebenezer Cooke, Poet. It prompts him to ask: "What might that mean, pray? Can it be you earn your bread by versifying? Or you're a kind of minstrel, belike that wanders about the countryside, a-begging and reciting? 'Tis a trade I know little of, I confess't." Cooke responds: "Poet I am ... and no mean one may it be; but not a penny have I earned by't, nor will I ever.

When the late Roland Flint, former Maryland poet laureate, would read to students for the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, the organization's president often would sit in the classroom and watch with awe the students' captivated faces. "He was just extraordinary," Ellen Conroy Kennedy said. "I never felt that we did our mission more than on those occasions." Flint, who died of cancer in January 2001 at age 66, meant a lot to Kennedy and HoCoPoLitSo, participating in more than 40 events in 24 years.

Amiri Baraka refuses to go gently into the gray twilight of retirement. A major literary provocateur for more than four decades, Baraka, now 68, has written what is currently the hottest poem in the United States, Somebody Blew up America, which is famous - or infamous - largely because the Jewish Anti-Defamation League has branded it anti-Semitic. Baraka, who defends himself vigorously against that charge, will be keynote speaker today at the "Write Now 4" African-American literary conference at Coppin State College.

Mark Strand, the former U.S. poet laureate who was lured to the Johns Hopkins University faculty four years ago amid much fanfare, is departing for the University of Chicago with a bitter blast at Hopkins, its administration and even Baltimore.On April 1, Strand, 63, will begin teaching literature at Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, an interdisciplinary think tank. He said his salary will be nearly doubled, from $82,000 to $146,000, and Hopkins made no counteroffer."Had Hopkins made some kind of gesture, even for a lower salary, I would have considered it," Strand said yesterday.

You could tell the real poetry lovers by the way they leaned forward as Linda Pastan read at Severn School yesterday, by their intense looks and serious questions.When did Maryland's poet laureate start writing? (Age 12.) Who were her favorite poets? (Yeats and T.S. Eliot.) Was she really as angry at men as some of her poems sounded?At this question, the Potomac resident looked surprised and started to laugh."I've recently celebrated my 40th wedding anniversary," she said. While women have not always been treated with the quality they deserve and some of her poems reflect that, she said, "I clearly like men!"

Like children at storytelling hour, students circle Roland Flint. But there is no need. He is big and burly and his soothing, deep voice rumbles into all corners of the classroom. He leans forward, as though into the poem he is reciting. It is about plums. Little by little, his low voice entrances. The plums are so sweet and so cold they can nearly be tasted. Slouchers straighten. Note-taking stops. Listening begins.For 36 years, Dr. Flint has shared with students his love of poetry. It is a love that has led him to read aloud in elementary schools, in prisons and on ABC's "Nightline."