"Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky was first to carry the torch, and commenced the renga with the lines, ???Beginning of October, maples / kindle in the East.??? Fifty-three stanzas later another former poet laureate, Robert Hass, finished the poem on the West Coast, imagining hikers who ???Unpack their lunches and stare at the Pacific.??? In between Pinsky and Hass, poets such as Rita Dove, Mark" . . . . .