Poets

A prize-winning poet who used verse to describe her experiences as a child and as an Indian immigrant was identified by police Thursday as the woman who slashed the wrist of her 2-year-old son and her own Wednesday and then died with him in a pool of blood. Reetika Vazirani, 40, and Jehan Vazirani Komunyakaa were found lying next to each other in the dining room of a house in Chevy Chase, Md., where Vazirani was house-sitting.

Let us feed the pigeons at the City Hall urging them to do their duty in the Mayor's office. --Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from his poem "Junkman's Obbligato," 1958. **** As a rule, Lawrence Ferlinghetti disdains government and avoids contact with officialdom. But after a lifetime of thumbing his nose (poetically speaking) at respectability and authority, the Beat Generation poet-painter-publisher finally got an offer last year he could not refuse.

From government leaders and billionaire businessmen to jeans-clad students and workers, this nation on Monday mourned the death of Octavio Paz, its Nobel Prize-winning poet and philosopher who died over the weekend at age 84. "Octavio Paz is a teacher of Mexico and the world.

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, a reclusive widow whose seductively simple verse has captured the wit and wisdom of everyday life for the past half century, has been awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday in Stockholm. Unassuming, shy and obsessively protective of her privacy, Szymborska had been considered a longshot for the prestigious prize, which was presented to another poet, Irishman Seamus Heaney, last year.

As success stories go, it's a grisly one. By his own account, Jimmy Santiago Baca's parents divorced and abandoned him to a grandparent when he was 2. Later, his mother was murdered by her second husband and his father died of alcoholism. By 5, the young mestizo (half Chicano/half "detribalized Apache") was abandoned again, left at a New Mexico orphanage where he stayed until he was 11, running away the night before he was to be transferred to Boy's Town.

En Zacatecas nacido (I was born in Zacatecas) poeta y compositor (poet and composer) --Lino Espino's business card * There was one for Cesar Chavez, the Latino labor organizer. When President John F. Kennedy died, dozens were written. Another, on the life and times of a Mexican outlaw, was made into the movie "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez." And now, a corrido, or folk song, has been dedicated to hundreds of striking drywall workers.

This year's officially sanctioned poet has heard many times the jokes about the poet laureate having to write odes to the President's horse. He has ushered a photographer from People magazine into the Cummington, Mass., house where he lives with his wife, and has been forced to flee a Library of Congress balcony when another photographer aroused the concern of the Capitol police. And he has been asked and asked and asked about the state of poetry today.

After spending decades in Communist prison camps in Vietnam, Nguyen Chi Thien escaped in 1979 and scaled the wall of the British Embassy in Hanoi to deliver his life's work, a collection of more than 400 poems. The title: "Flowers From Hell." He was captured and again imprisoned, but the work won him international recognition and was translated into eight languages.

U.S. poet laureate Louise Gluck has decided to leave Williams College in Massachusetts for a writer-in-residence position at Yale University. Gluck will teach two poetry writing courses at Yale this fall. Her appointment is for a five-year, renewable term, according to Yale spokeswoman Dorie Baker. Gluck, 60, of Cambridge, has taught at Williams since 1983, usually only during the fall semester.

Derek Walcott, a West Indian poet whose ancestors were slaves, won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, marking the first time the award has gone to a Caribbean writer. Called a modern-day Homer by some critics, the 62-year-old poet was honored for an extensive body of work that offers a rich, evocative blend of African, West Indian and European cultural traditions. "In him, West Indian culture has found its great poet," said the Swedish Academy of Letters in awarding the $1.