When I began pondering my poem "Thomas Hardy Listens To Louis Armstrong" in 2002, I read Hardy's "Collected Poems", on the lookout for words and phrases to plunder and then incorporate into my planned poem. As I remembered it, I read the whole book of 948 poems. But today, after a student asked to work on Hardy's poems for her BA exam, I pulled the book off the shelf, noticed a bookmark near the end of the book, and discovered that I had only read his poems from the 1920s, the time when he might have had the opportunity, before his death in 1927, to hear Louis Armstrong's 1925 Hot Fives. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 February 2026)