Poet Laureate

The pages are blank in the leather-bound journal sitting on the bookshelf in Brian Lutz's bedroom. He bought the journal four years ago for about $90 in a cathedral in Florence, Italy. He planned to write poems - his poems - on the unlined, cream-colored pages. "It's intimidating. I'm waiting for some sign I'm good enough to write in it," said Lutz, 27, who recently earned a master's degree in fine arts from Southampton College in New York. Validation came last month when Lutz was recognized as the 2003 Bucks County poet laureate.

Out of the ash she rises with red hair, eating men like air. In her latest resurrection, Lady Lazarus, poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), arrives in the form of Gwyneth Paltrow, star of filmmaker Christine Jeffs' portrait of the artist as a glowing meteor doomed to vaporize in Earth's atmosphere. Make that a double portrait, for Jeffs' actual subject is the volatile marriage of Plath and Ted Hughes, also a poet (and in 1984 named poet laureate of England), whose first wife, Plath, and his second, Assia Wevill, took their own lives.

A message of hate is scrawled on a basement wall of a prestigious university. Assailants pelt a wheelchair-bound man with an aluminum can and anti-Semitic expletives. Swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti are written in a restroom of a middle school; a 9-foot menorah outside a Jewish center is dumped into a stream. While these anti-Semitic incidents are horrific and disturbing, even more shocking may be just how close to home they occurred. Each incident transpired in New Jersey, and each is an example of the sad escalation of anti-Semitic activities throughout our state, the nation and the world.

The state poet laureate is out. Medical-malpractice reform is in limbo. But the partisan budget tussle is over. During a 32-hour marathon in the state Senate and Assembly, sharply focused on the state budget, weary legislators voted on a flurry of bills, sending 52 to the governor yesterday. Some bills thrived with quick, easy passage, while others were overshadowed by the budget drama. Medical-malpractice reform - a hot partisan issue in Trenton this spring - will rest until the houses return to Trenton in September, with the Senate and Assembly unable to compromise on how to fix the problem of skyrocketing malpractice insurance premiums for doctors.

He always had a lot to write about, Ed Galing. A Jewish kid who grew up poor on New York's Lower East Side and then moved to South Philadelphia, where his father settled him and his mother into a three-room walk-up and promptly disappeared, and who struggled to keep his own family afloat through hard times in a housing project, Galing always had to get it out on paper, click-clacking away on a typewriter in the bathroom at night so as not to...

Bryn Mawr College has an illustrious and long history - 118 years to be exact - as a sterling academic institution for serious, bright young women, historically bypassing such traditional areas of study as education and the arts. This was not the place for prancing girls in black leotards or those lost in the world of their journals, a perception that continues to this day when a third of its 1,330 undergraduate enrollment major in the sciences. But Bryn Mawr "wants to encourage a greater balance in life, and is raising its profile in the arts," says provost Ralph Kuncl.

I am in disbelief that Chief Allenbach got suspended from his job ("Camden suspends police chief," March 7). He is the only official that I've met who actually does what he says he's going to do. In my experience, he is the only official who goes to every community meeting, actually gives you a phone number that works, and gets you an immediate response. He is unflagging in his efforts and energy. If he says he is going to take care of the drug corner for you, he will. This man has worked for the residents of Camden for 29 years, making sure the streets were semi-safe.

State's open space will be developed if policy unchecked Your recent article scratched the surface of an old open-space scam ("Other needs challenge off-limits idea of parks," Jan. 21). Unfortunately, the "diversion" of the state's Green Acres open space for other uses is not a new trend. Local politicians promise to save open space in their campaigns, but often can't resist trying to develop it later. Open-space development rewards campaign contributors (mostly lawyers, engineers and real estate developers)

It may be that wherever he goes, New Jersey's poet laureate Amiri Baraka is there to oppose popular consensus. Even yesterday, as he spoke at a breakfast honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and sponsored by the Burlington County chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Baraka, 68, said he never really understood Dr. King's teachings until 10 years ago. But this crowd had come to hear what Baraka had to say. So there were...

The New Jersey Legislature seems hell-bent on abolishing the post of state poet laureate only two years after it was created. This is overkill. It is a kneejerk reaction to controversy. Yet a bill to eliminate the post has sailed through committee and awaits full Senate action following the holiday recess. The lawmakers have reason to be upset with current poet laureate Amiri Baraka, whose controversial poem, "Somebody Blew Up America," included a reprehensible suggestion that Jews were responsible for the World Trade Center attack.