As I spend yet another morning applying for a job I won't get, I find myself in the position of having to write "A Statement of My Teaching Philosophy." I have no idea if this is what the institution wants from me, but this is what it's going to get.

According to Robert Frost, “a poem is the act of having an idea and how it feels to have an idea.” A key element of learning to enact this process—that is, of learning to read, write, and revise poetry—is to recognize the way in which unfolding details of grammar and syntax guide, for instance, intellectual, emotional, narrative, or sonic revelation. For as Frost also noted, “a poem should be a set of sentences,” and attention to the way in which a poet engages with the sentence not only leads us toward a focus on line, metaphor, image, diction, form, and other devices but also helps us as writers to discover what it is that we truly need to say. Frost declared that “no one can imagine a planned poem,” but in truth many apprentice poets wrestle with exactly this problem. So a focus on the movement of the sentence is one way to help them learn to envision poems as vehicles of discovery, to take risks with the unknown and the unconsidered while refining their ability to handle the tools of the language.