Reed Whittemore, Handyman to the Muse

Influential Poet Writes the Work of His Life

Reed Whittemore, at 88 sometimes slowed by vascular dementia, ably reads from his poetry at Politics and Prose. (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)

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By Bob Thompson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 3, 2008

The word man is reading. Who knows if this will be his last time?

It's a Sunday afternoon at Politics and Prose in Northwest Washington, and a goodly crowd has gathered to celebrate Reed Whittemore's "Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet," which was published last fall. Whittemore is the author of 20 books and a former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a job since renamed, more grandly, Poet Laureate.

He is also 88 years old, with a memory that has betrayed him. Vascular dementia is the culprit, and it sometimes leaves him confused as well. Friends and family stand by to read in case he can't.

He can.

"Thank you. At least I got up," he says, drawing a welcoming laugh.

He reads a poem called "A Teacher," which is what he was for much of his life, first at Carleton College in Minnesota and then at the University of Maryland:

He hated them all one by one but wanted to show them

What was Important and Vital and by God if

They thought they'd never have use for it he was

Sorry as hell for them, that's all, with their genteel

Mercantile Main Street Babbitt

Bourgeois-barbaric faces, they were beyond

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