Lines for Winter

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "Lines for Winter," by Mark Strand. Mark Strand was born in 1934 on Prince Edward Island, Canada. He was raised in a secular Jewish family, and as a young man, attended the Iowa Writers Workshop. From 2005 until his death in 2014, Strand taught literature and creative writing at Columbia University. During his career, he received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and appointment as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.