By Kristin Waller

As former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky reminded the audience with the words of John Donne, “No man is an island.” And so it was that a star-studded panel of Boston-area poets, including Jericho Brown RI ’10 and Gail Mazur BI ’97, RI ’09, gathered in Harvard’s Longfellow Hall on February 23 to benefit Partners in Health and the earthquake-stricken people of Haiti.

With more than 20 poets represented, a wide range of work memorialized the hundreds of thousands killed in January’s tremor. The event, cosponsored by the Woodberry Poetry Room and the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, raised nearly $4,000 from approximately 260 attendees.

Brown, who is the 2009–2010 American Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, read two pieces: his “Track 5: Summertime,” from the 2008 collection Please, and “Cruelty,” by Lucille Clifton, an African American poet and Pulitzer Prize nominee who passed away on February 13.

Mazur spoke of loss and change, but she closed with words of hope, reading “Young Apple Tree, December,” which was originally published in her 2005 collection Zeppo’s First Wife and reprinted in the Winter 2009 issue of the Radcliffe Quarterly.

The benefit also featured readings by Nadia Herman-Colburn ’95, Wendy Mnookin ’68, and Haiti native Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell BI ’93.

Photo: Mirly Etienne receives clean drinking water from the French Red Cross in Camp Dihautsu, an internally displaced persons camp in Port-au-Prince, January 27, 2010. By Talia Frenkel / American Red Cross.