Married Poets Craft Love Poems by the Clock (original) (raw)

JEFFREY BROWN:

Last week on a visit to Washington, Mary Jo Salter and Brad Leithauser visited some favorite places, the National Gallery of Art and the National Cathedral.

Salter and Leithauser are acclaimed poets, with over a dozen volumes and many honors between them. They're professors at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and they're married to each other.

Poetry, in fact, is how they met, in a Harvard class of young would-be bards. They've been a team ever since, married for 26 years, raising two daughters.

But on the day we met up with them, the poets were preparing to face off in a rather unusual competition.

So it's a little like preparing for a big game here. How do you feel?