News at Eleven: The word man is reading.

Who knows if this will be his last time?

It's a Sunday afternoon at Politics and Prose in Northwest Washington, and a goodly crowd has gathered to celebrate Reed Whittemore's "Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet," which was published last fall. Whittemore is the author of 20 books and a former poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a job since renamed, more grandly, Poet Laureate.

He is also 88 years old, with a memory that has betrayed him.

from The Washington Post: Reed Whittemore, Handyman to the Muse

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