Last night, when I was packing up all the poetry, a little piece of paper fluttered out of Anne Sexton’s Live or Die, a book I lived and died by at sixteen. It was a poem cut out of The New Yorker.  It was “For Sheridan” by Robert Lowell. I had no idea who he was at the time, and I didn’t really understand the poem. But I felt the poem understood me. That is when I started buying up collections of Lowell’s poems. And now, thirty years later, the love affair continues as I finish reading the exquisite collection of letters between him and Elizabeth Bishop.

I tend not to worry too much about the end of the book and the digital revolution. But I did have the thought that one of things that might be missed if books go the way of screens is the loss of a poem, clipped by a sad teenager, fluttering out of a book many years later to land at the feet of a sad woman.

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