I'm delighted to tell you about a five-part online course that I'll be teaching this winter on the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Galway Canal.

The course is called That Poetry by Which I Lived.

With the help of Canel's former students, admirers, and friends such as the poet Sharon Olds, Toye

Derekot, Robert Haas, and Edwood Hersh.

We will move through the life, work, and influence of this extraordinary American poet.

I hope you'll join us online this winter. You can learn more at

community of writers.org. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown. down.

I am sappy when it comes to romance. I am sappy when it comes to romance. I chalk it up to the R&B music of my youth,

songs about longing that anchored tenderness as essential,

and hone in on loneliness as the bluesy aftermath of love gone awry.

Today's poem knows both that softness and that messiness.

Letter to the editor by Andrea Gibson. 1. There was a typo in the book. The line read, I want to marry you, but Mary was spelled M-E-R-R-Y.

I thought that's what I want to do.

Mary somebody until their blush paints the town red.

Two. Years ago I went home with a woman and right before our lips met for the first time, she jumped up out of the bed, ran to her

closet, and grabbed the stethoscope. She put the earpieces in my ears, slipped the knob down her shirt onto her heart and whispered,

I want you to listen to my heart speed up when you kiss me.

I kissed her and I listened as it beat faster and faster. I gave her an apple when I left. She kept the seeds and has called me Johnny ever since, but we didn't

live happily ever after.

Three. When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend named Johnny.

He did all the bad stuff.

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