Cooper is wonderful. School is over. The WNBA season has begun. It's a good time for short sentences and long evenings at or near the backyard grill. Also a good time to lowball the value of poetry, as I did in a piece picked up by the Boston Globe…

When I'm feeling unusually busy at home I think of a saying communicated to me by someone else I trust absolutely, but atttributed (by that someone else) to the scholar Marjorie Nicolson: "You can always read a sonnet." That is, you've always got t...