Poet Laureate

Literature -- and in this instance, poetry -- holds a mirror to life; thus the great themes of life become the great themes of poems. Here the distinguished American poet John Haines addresses -- and celebrates through the affirmation of poetry -- our preoccupation with aging and mortality. --Ted Kooser "Young Man" I seemed always standing before a door to which I had no key, although I knew it hid behind it a gift for me. Until one day I closed my eyes a moment, stretched then looked once more.

Voices This fine poem by Rodney Torreson of Grand Rapids, Mich., looks into the world of boys arriving at the edge of manhood and compares their natural wildness to that of dogs, with whom they feel a kinship. "On A Moonstruck Gravel Road" The sheep-killing dogs saunter home, wool scraps in their teeth. From the den of the moon ancestral wolves howl their approval. The farm boys, asleep in their beds, live the same wildness under their lids; every morning they come back through the whites of their eyes to do their chores, their hands pausing to pet the dog, to press its ears back, over the skull, to quiet that other world.

Joseph Brodsky, 55, a Russian exile and Nobel Prize-winning poet who became poet laureate of the United States, died of a heart attack in his sleep yesterday at his Brooklyn, N.Y., home."

Distinguished Howard County poet Lucille Clifton will be a speaker and HoCoPoLitSo President Ellen Conroy Kennedy will be a panelist at a celebration in honor of the late poet Sterling A. Brown tomorrow at the Library of Congress in Washington. The two-day conference, "Sterling Brown: American Poet and Cultural Worker," is sponsored by Callaloo magazine, a publication of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville and by the office of the U.S. poet laureate. Clifton will speak at 6 p.m. tomorrow in the Montpelier Room in the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. Clifton, a distinguished professor of humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland and former Maryland poet laureate, was a student of Brown's at Howard University in the 1950s.

The lowdown -- Former U.S. poet laureate and frequent A Prairie Home Companion guest Billy Collins will deliver the Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading on Mother's Day at the Johns Hopkins University. In addition to his 2001- 2003 stint as poet laureate, Collins has been named a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library Literary Lion. If you go -- Collins' reading begins at 5 p.m. Sunday at Shriver Hall, the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St. A reception will be held at 4:30 p.m., and Collins will autograph books after the reading.