Subscribe to Blog via Email
Search the site
Categories
A Fine Line
Tags
- a favorite author
- a favorite novelist
- Anne Tyler
- Annie Dillard
- Ann Patchett
- Barbara Pym
- British humor
- Charles Dickens
- Courage to Teach
- depression
- Discussion in the College Classroom
- Elizabeth Strout
- Henry David Thoreau
- Henry Taylor
- iGen
- Jane Smiley
- Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Learner-Centered Teaching
- learning
- Margaret Atwood
- Mary Oliver
- Memoir
- metaphors
- My Struggle
- Nobel Prize
- Parker Palmer
- pedagogy
- poetry
- Pulitzer Prize
- Pulitzer Prize winner
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- recommended
- Reflection
- Richard Russo
- Shakespeare
- Small Teaching
- Ted Kooser
- The Spark of Learning
- truth
- Virginia Woolf
- Walt Whitman
- William Stafford
- William Zinsser
- you-are-there reading
-
Recent Posts
- “Show me yourself.”
- “When people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir – here’s what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop.”
- “In 1848 William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple in Georgia, embarked on a five-thousand-mile journey of mutual self-emancipation across the world.”
- “There are those who believe they know – and those who hope they may yet know.”
- “I learned that writing a memoir is like figure skating: it looks effortless and beautiful from the outside. . .”
Archives
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
Recent Comments
- kjumai on “There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations.”
- bababhuvaneshus on “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo . . .”
- Owen Landsverk on 10 Best Books for College Teachers Update
- Alex on “Judging by her publicity photos, the natural assumption would be that American novelist Edith Wharton wrote in a traditional manner, at the gold-tooled leather-topped desk in her extremely well-stocked library.”
- David Milbradt on “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…”
Category Archives: poetry
“There are those who believe they know – and those who hope they may yet know.”
Seven pages into the preface of his huge collection of poems, Carl Sandburg tells us that he will not pontificate on the art of poetry, which is what famous writers often do in that section. Instead, he says “A poet … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Carl Sandburg, Complete Poems, leader as learner, learning, seeking, traveling
Leave a comment
Ten Years of Writing about Poetry Has Taught Me This
Poetry is the most textured form of writing. It attracts artists who weave sounds and images with mystery. They may be cranky (T. S. Eliot) or homesick (Heaney) or humorous (Billy Collins). They may believe that poetry is an instrument … Continue reading
“We get the Dialectic fairly well.”
Why would a poem written in 1940 be included in The Best American Poetry 2023? W. H. Auden’s brilliant poem about contradictions wasn’t published during his lifetime because he questioned its value. Auden was a great poet who doubted his … Continue reading
“…I see in the flashlight beam, a world of dust . . . massing, revolving back, splitting into twos and threes and lonely ones—”
The poet Rasma Haidri continues, “and I know I orchestrated this fugue of spheres.” I love the way hope infuses this poem – and many of the poems – in this collection. We see stories about people who are looking … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged a favorite author, Blue like Apples, poems infused with hope, Rasma Haidri, writing in Norway
Leave a comment
“I live on the boundary of the outside and the inside.”
I’ve always believed that the best way to take the pulse of a bookstore is to check out the display on the front table. Instead of best-sellers, this bookstore featured Czech poets – a treat for someone like me who … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Czech Poets, Czechia literary traditions, distrust of boundaries, Zbyněk Hejda
Leave a comment
“Even as I write these words I am planning to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.”
We all know the feeling of being torn between wanting to take the time to think deeply and needing to get up to get something done. The tension between lofty ideas and everyday practicalities is a theme that runs through … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged coexistence of lofty and mundane, Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
Leave a comment
“One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice –”
Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey” continues, “though the whole house / began to tremble / and you felt the old tug / at your ankles . . .” The journey she describes didn’t stop, even though it was “a wild … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Mary Oliver, Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life, The Journey
Leave a comment
“Go north a dozen years on a road overgrown with vines to find the days after you were born.”
This remarkable first line of the poem “Sight” by Faith Shearin does three things: it provides a way to visualize a journey back in time along “a road overgrown with vines.” It includes an interesting slant rhyme with “vines” and … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Faith Shearin, Orpheus, Sight, The past wants you back., Turning
Leave a comment
“Lately I’ve found myself reaching for the books of certain familiar writers, whose own zest and energy offer some kindly remedy to my condition.”
Perhaps you can relate to this: while I enjoy the holidays, I also am running low on the “zest and energy” that Mary Oliver describes in this essay. Her solution to this problem is to reconnect with familiar writers. Her … Continue reading
Posted in non-fiction, poetry
Tagged a favorite poet, Blue Pastures, Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winner, remain curious
Leave a comment
“And you O my soul, where you stand, surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space . . .until the bridge you will need be form’d…”
And you, O my reader, where you sit, reading from a screen that holds more words than the mind can store, what do you do after reading Whitman’s poetry? Some respond by “Whitmanizing” in bold statements or expressive art. The … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Great American poet, soul and spirit, Walt Whitman, Whitmanize
Leave a comment
“Any radical change in poetic form is likely to be the symptom of some very much deeper change in society and in the individual.”
What a crank T. S. Eliot must have been! He is the champion of contradiction. Consider this: his difficult and complex poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” revolutionized poetry, and many consider it to be a prime example … Continue reading
“I became a fine singer . . .in later years I was to be of great help to my husband with his song writing.”
As a fan of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, I was unaware of the role that Burns’ wife played with the development of his songs until I toured the home that he lived in at the time of his death … Continue reading
Posted in non-fiction, poetry
Tagged Jean Armour, Robert Burns, wife of Robert Burns
Leave a comment
“The man o’ independent mind / He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.”
Picture this: in the 1700s, a poet from Scotland united his fellow countrymen by showing them how to respond to the rich and powerful. He recommended laughter. Meet Robert Burns – known as the “ploughman poet” – who grew up … Continue reading
Posted in poetry
Tagged Greatest Ever Scot, independent minded, Robert Burns, Romantic era poet
Leave a comment
“I stand here coiled in orbits, head to foot, because this tilted world is where I live.”
The great poet Henry Taylor must have been in a cranky mood when he compiled this collection of 100 poems that span his 50-year career. Taylor chose not to follow the convention of inviting a respected peer to write an … Continue reading