Originally broadcast in 2000. This is FRESH AIR. We'll end this week by remembering the poet Michael Harper, who died Saturday at age 78. He was known for his poems that were influenced by and ...

He was the first poet laureate of the State of Rhode Island from 1988 to 1993. Michael S. Harper is university professor and professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970.

Some of the poems which Michael S. Harper wrote on the experience of the stillborn death of his two infant sons, an inspiration for “playing through the pain,” in the medium of poetry ...