just found out via tom clark's blog that the poet larry fagin [1937 - 2017] died

fagin was profiled some years back in the magazine poets & writers [you can find the article on his website]

i admired fagin even tho i didn't know him personally, he was a handsome man, who lived a relatively long life on his terms

but the funny thing about age in the 21st century is that a septuagenarian is no longer thought of as an old person but in the time of yeats it was, yeats was the grand old man of letters

but age today is something else so when i look at photos of fagin i see, yes, an older man, but a vibrant, charismatic, good looking poet in love with the art of living, of poetry and the teaching of poetry

now that i'm getting up there in age too i can only hope to be as cool as larry fagin was in his relatively long life, who wrote poetry at the first intensity

r.i.p.