March 1: A Good Day for Poetry

If he were still alive, Robert Lowell could be celebrating his 88th birthday with Richard Wilbur, who turns 84 today (and is not, as an erroneous first draft of this item suggested, no longer with us). If you want to see them together, you'll have to wait a few more weeks until Adam Kirsch's The Wounded Surgeon shows up in bookstores...oh, wait, no, I'm totally confused. The book does have an excellent chapter on Lowell, but Kirsch wrote about Wilbur in the New Yorker last fall, when the Collected Poems came out. Keep an eye out for the book anyway, why don't you? It's awfully good.

Howard Nemerov would have turned 85 today, were he still around, so this would have been some party. But maybe Wilbur can share his cake with the comparatively young Robert Hass, who is now a spry 64.