Mary Oliver

Responding to a court order, murder suspect Diana J. Haun gave police and prosecutors a handwriting sample Thursday in the investigation of the kidnap-slaying of Ventura homemaker Sherri Dally. At the same time, the victim's husband, Michael Dally, also identified as a suspect by law enforcement sources, voluntarily spent three hours with investigators, police said.

Testimony in the penalty phase of convicted killer Diana Haun's murder trial concluded a full day ahead of schedule Tuesday after the defendant's relatives and former fiance testified about the events that shaped her life. Haun broke into tears as her 72-year-old mother--described by her children as a reserved woman who rarely shows emotion--quietly professed her love for her oldest daughter and wept. "She is very dear to me," Kiku Haun told the jury as her 36-year-old daughter dropped her head.

UC San Diego's music department may not be the bunch of wild-eyed iconoclasts of earlier days, but the 50-member delegation of musicians that descended on West Germany's Darmstadt contemporary music festival last month still managed to raise a few eyebrows. After an appearance by (The), a performance-art duo with a decidedly Dadaist sense of humor, one of the European festival participants upbraided (The) member Ed Harkins. "He was shocked at (The).

During Diana Haun's lengthy murder trial, the jury heard little evidence on her background--her childhood, life experiences or the events that shaped her growth as an individual. But when the jury returns next week for the penalty phase, that is exactly what defense attorneys want it to hear as they try to paint a more complete picture of the woman now facing possible execution for killing her lover's wife.

Roman Catholic religious orders are between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion short of funds to finance even modest retirement programs for aging nuns and brothers, a church-sponsored study made public here Friday says. The situation is "a national crisis that has been coming for the last 10 years" and is forcing some religious orders to sell property or seek public assistance for retiring nuns, said Msgr. Daniel Hoye of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Buying Time: An Anthology Celebrating 20 Years of the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, edited by Scott Walker (Graywolf Press: $20) "Buying Time" is a collection of prose and poetry assembled to commemorate the first 20 years of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature program. It is also a convincing argument that the federal government does better at funding writers than it does with farm subsidies at home or with covert political operations abroad.

Among the complaints infrequently heard among local music aficionados is the dearth of avant-garde music programs. Nevertheless, downtown's Installation gallery is inaugurating its own music series Oct. 8 with a concert by electric guitarist Mark Trayle. "There are very few venues for new music outside of academia," said gallery director Dan Wasil. "In fact, outside of UC San Diego, there isn't anything for electronic music or a different approach to acoustic work."

April is national poetry month. If this comes as news to you, don't feel bad. This annual occasion to renew and deepen the American love of verse is too often drowned out by the ballyhoo around, say, National VD Awareness Month. Indeed, statistically, more people are likely to contract syphilis in April than read a book of poetry. If you're asking, I'll take poetry.