My friend Anne Britting Oleson is a poet with a day job as an English teacher at a local central Maine high school. Anne and I have an intermittent and somewhat humorous relationship, predicated as much on contiguity as on writing. Not only have our sons have played on rival Little League teams, not only has she judged pies at the Harmony Fair's two-crust apple pie contest, but she even used to be married to someone who was related by marriage to the people who own the Harmony garage where I buy my gas and leave my lawnmower for repair and perch on a stool reading War and Peace after being rescued from middle-of-the-road breakdowns and so forth. As you can see, with these sorts of connections, Anne and I are practically related ourselves.

Last summer Anne attended the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and, as a result of that week, was determined to experiment with the idea of introducing a poem a day to her English students. She's kept track of this project on her blog, and I find her thoughts and observations about how the practice has affected her students both enlightening and heart-lifting. But that practice has done more than affect her students: it has changed her as well. As she writes in her most recent blog entry, she (with her students' encouragement) has just finished a daily project in which she wrote a response sonnet--what she calls an anti-sonnet--to every one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.

In her post, Anne is kind enough to refer to my own Milton odyssey as an influence; but what strikes me most about her description of the experience is the way in which her high school students prompted her to keep up with the project. They began playing the role that she had taught them by example: to not only read a poem a day but to make it an active element of one's intellectual and emotional growth. To me, this is yet more proof that intense, communal classroom involvement in poetry can simultaneously expand students' intellectual reach and their ability to function as civilized, engaged, free-thinking adults.

I am extraordinarily impressed by Anne's determination to be both a teacher and a student in the classroom, and I am very much looking forward to visiting this class in February and watching her--and her students--in action.