The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.

As traditions of mourning wane, women's role as designated mourners has also vanished. In consequence, the woman elegist must summon her own resources as an artist.

Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'

The power of elegy, even in the face of an unbounded grief, to provide a containing form is vividly embodied by Anne Carson's 'Nox,' a nocturne with carefully controlled visual and tactile properties.

I'm a leukemia survivor, and I recall during my darkest days in the hospital when my friends would come to see me, especially the male friends - they had certain mortality issues with their visit.

This might be the first generation where kids are dying at a younger age than their parents and it's related primarily to the obesity problem.

And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.

I have never joined the Facebook world because, to be truthful, social media scares me to death. It is kind of crazy how huge that world is, so I have never joined Facebook, but I do have Instagram and Twitter.