Today’s program is my fiftieth weekly episode. Fifty has various cultural and symbolic significances. Fifty is also significant to me because this year marks fifty years that I have been writing and publishing poetry. It is also the year when my 50th book will be published – Collected Poems 1970-2020 – which gathers poems published during those fifty years. So this program will be a two-part program. Today I read poems that incorporate fifty in differing ways: by William Butler Yeats, J.D. McClatchy, Langston Hughes, Hungarian poet Imre Oravecz, and Canadian poet Glen Sorestad. Next week, in part two of this sequence, I will read poems that I wrote over the course of the past fifty years, one from each of the decades since 1970.