Applications are now open for this year's Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. And scholarships are available; so if you or your colleagues have been toying with attending, you should apply early. I can't wait to sit on Robert Frost's porch with you.

Maybe we'll sit there and drink wine and talk about Wislawa Szymborska, the great Polish poet who died yesterday. Along with Joe Bolton and Hayden Carruth, I count Szymborska among the handful of contemporary poets who changed my life. Maybe I should teach a class with that title: Poets Who Changed My Life. I wonder if students would be bored or fascinated?

I love many Szymborska poems, but this one, "In Praise of My Sister," is a particular comfort . . . living here, as I have for so long, in a faraway land filled with people who do not write poetry . . . all these people whom I love because they don't write poetry. I hope that a few of you readers who visit this blog--you know who you are: the friends who skip the poems I suggest because reading poems makes you uncomfortable or confused, or you're too busy and plan to read them later and then you forget, or you don't trust my taste in poetry but visit here for some other unarticulated reason--I hope you try reading "In Praise of My Sister." I think you will be amazed. You might even cry, in a good way.