How many former English majors are there like me who, in recent years, have been momentarily diverted from literature? I spent years in college slaving on various literary magazines. But these days, keeping up with blogland controversies and e-mailing my friends pictures of dancing bananas means less time for actual reading, and some pursuits, like poetry, have gotten shoved aside entirely.

I realized this when there was terrible news from the poetry world over the weekend:

A prize-winning poet who used verse to describe her experiences as a child and as an Indian immigrant was identified by D.C. police yesterday as the woman who apparently slashed the left 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 the Chevy Chase section of Washington, where Vazirani was house-sitting.

I regret describing people in terms of their significant others, but in this case the story made me gasp. Vazirani's child was the son of Yusef Komunyakaa, who is one of my favorite poets. (I got to interview him during his tenure at Indiana in 1994, just after he won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, and we went to see him perform this spring at the Poetry Center.) I hadn't followed her career, but I discoverd that her poetry is worth a read: find some samples here, here, and here, as well as a bio. (For what it's worth, here's also an apparently hasty follow-up article on poetry and suicide.)

One poet whom I've discovered too late and another one touched by tragedy. I'm saddened for the family and newly resolved to catch up on my poetry reading.