from a recent essay about the poetry of Marie de France, Jan Kochanowski, and Phillis Wheatley:

In an era when the Bible was often the only book in a New England house, Phillis Wheatley received an extraordinary education. The average free white man in Boston never glimpsed such riches. But for an obsessed reader, too much is never enough. Although the Wheatleys' slave girl had faith in herself—“While an intrinsic ardor prompts to write, / The muses promise to assist my pen”—she must have struggled to make peace with the knowledge that only university men would have the opportunity “to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space.”

            Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was Wheatley’s only published collection of poetry. The title suggests a stricture of tone and topic that the poems themselves sometimes belie. Or perhaps Wheatley’s conception of religious and moral was a more complicated amalgam of conviction and “intrinsic ardor.” She was, after all, well acquainted with Milton’s Paradise Lost, which might easily be construed as an argument for imagination as a moral virtue.

from The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet

Dawn Potter

In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser prefers to use the word witness rather than reader or listener because it “includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence.”

The overtone of responsibility in this word is not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here which is that climate of excitement and revelation giving air to the work of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self.

            These three terms of relationship—poet, poem, and witness—are none of them static. We are changing, living beings experiencing the inner change of poetry.

            Reading, conversation, and writing are bound to one another. What we read not only changes us but presses us, in Rukeyser’s terms, to take “responsibility” for “giving evidence” of that change. For an analogy, think of how listening intensely to music can press a songwriter to create her own work. Yes, the listener is acquiring information about song craft and construction. But she’s also drawing the sounds and emotional resonance into her inner self. Her subsequent need to write her own music is driven by the “climate of excitement and revelation” that creates her “inner change.”

            Philip Levine describes this sensation in his essay “The Poet in New York in Detroit”:

I had known García Lorca only as the author of the “gypsy poems,” a writer of lovely, exotic poems that meant little to me. But now one Saturday afternoon became a miracle as I stood in the stacks of the Wayne University library, my hands trembling, and read my life in his words. How had this strange young Andalusian, later murdered by his countrymen, come to understand my life, how had he mastered the language of my rage? This poet of grace and “deep song” had somehow caught my emotions in a way I never had, and suddenly he opened a door for me to a way of speaking about my life. I accepted his gift. That’s what they give us, the humble workers in the field of poetry, these amazingly inspired geniuses, gifts that change our lives.

So it’s important, whether you’re in the classroom or working alone at home, to make sure that your forays into writing aren’t limited to detached poetry prompts. By linking creative writing directly to creative yet focused reading, you and your students may be lucky enough to discover that “suddenly [a poet] opened a door for me to a way of speaking about my life.”

from a teaching article I wrote this week:

Like music, dance, theater, and the visual arts, poetry is integral to intellectual and emotional growth. In the words of literacy specialists Jan Miller Burkins and Kim Yaris, “After carefully studying and reflecting on each of the [Common Core] anchor standards, we are convinced that poetry is one of the best sources for complex text, as it offers opportunities to engage and integrate all the standards for reading literature” (http://www.burkinsandyaris.com/poetry-and-the-reading-standards/).

But I don’t just teach poetry because it has educational value. I teach poetry because it pulls me into direct engagement with my inner life while also drawing me closer to other people. As Robert Frost wrote, “All poetry does is try to catch you off guard with reminders of old sights and sounds.” This is one of the many gifts of poetry: it suddenly brings a reader into intimate contact with her own forgotten self.

            This is also why poetry is an ideal medium for working with groups of people who are wrestling with difficult issues. There is a long history of using poetry as a way to support health-care providers, prisoners, veterans, and other people in traumatic situations. More than any other form of literature, poetry offers a compact and efficient way to share emotions and thoughts. It also serves as a model for thinking about the world and our place in it. By talking together about a poem, we learn to trust our own curiosity while respecting the differing opinions around us. In other words, the conversation is a form of civil engagement, and one that is sorely lacking in most of our lives—particularly if we have been living with violence, repression, or ridicule.

Birth of a Social Worker: A Personal Statement

A guest post by Angela DeRosa

I became a social worker the day I closed David Copperfield after reading it the summer before turning 12. The propensity was there at an earlier age but Charles Dickens set my course.  Strong sayings, but my viewpoint is constantly reinforced, and never so much as by Dawn Potter, my long time friend. She and I met over a piece she read on MPBN for Veterans Day nearly 20 years ago. I found her in the phone book and called to see if I could visit.  We connected over the phone, she pregnant, and me with a 2 year old. I arrived for our first visit with a paper bag full of clean, used diapers! That has somehow become a metaphor for our relationship, the world of literature and intellectualism always balanced by kids, leaky faucets, flat tires and all the other day-to-day things that make up a life.

Psychologists at the New School for Social Research recently published a study headed by Emanuele Castana. He told USA Today that literary fiction “forces you as a reader to contribute your own interpretations, to reconstruct the mind of the character.” I will go further and say without hesitation that fiction ultimately shows you the universality of human experience. Whether reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe or Pride and and Prejudice by Jane Austen we can begin to see that our own feelings, struggles, and indeed, desperations, are the same the world over. How liberating for the 15 year old weeping over the first lost love, the 20 year old mortified by the rejection of a piece of art, the 30 year old unable to get pregnant, the old man dying in a hospital bed remembering his days at the ocean with his wife. How comforting, even if in the moment of suffering the profound aloneness of the individual can barely be bridged! 

This connecting with characters from other times and places gives us solitary humans the feeling that we are part of something bigger and that inherently we are not alone in this big wide universe. The ability see into ourselves becomes easier, as does the dawning of empathy, of forgiveness. Conventional wisdom exhorts us to change. I say understand: understand who we are, and use what we have. These bold statements are not hyperbole. They reflect a lifetime of reading and thinking and understanding that have grown from those early days when the trials of David Copperfield became my own.

Angela is a social worker, counselor, reader of novels, and friend extraordinaire who lives with master canoe builder Steve Cayard off the grid in Wellington, Maine.

Somewhere, buried in the attic, is my fifth-grade paper about Amy Lowell, and I have been hunting under snowshoes and behind Christmas decorations and in between boxes of summer clothes and forgotten dog toys, but I cannot find it anywhere. I feel very disappointed. My report has a beautiful pink construction-paper covered decorated with "fancy" transcriptions of Lowell poems, which is to say it's the sort of item no one would want to misplace. I'd a million times rather reread my fifth-grade paper about Amy Lowell than anything I wrote in college.

But no such luck. All I'm stuck with is two plastic binders of college papers and no construction-paper art. I did find some report cards, however.

According to my 1979 Differential Aptitude Test (age 15), I was off-the-charts great at spelling but had wonky spacial relations and clerical skills. How did they measure clerical skills? Did we have to file something?

In 1970 (age 5), I was "a sweet little girl," "an asset to [my] class," and "above grade level." I guess I didn't have to file anything that year. I like those old days when you could get a good grade for sweetness.

In 1972 (age 7), I discovered that I was "very much the perfectionist and aim[ed] so hard to please. A bit of easing up on this would be good for [me]."

In 1973 (age 8), I merely learned that "[my] progress in math has been commendable"--clearly one of those coded remarks that translates as "for a chunk of this year she was strangely incompetent."

This is reinforced by the remark in 1975 (age 10): "Dawn is unsure of long division at present."

By the time I got to middle and high school, teachers were enjoying the ease of automatic computerized comments. I received many "Has flair for the subject" commendations, as long as the subject was English or history. I was also frequently "Quiet and attentive," and once, in gym class, I "Showed sincere effort." I'm sorry to say, however, that in biology I had "Work missing" and was told I could have "Improved with more effort," although the teacher did admit that I was "Cooperative" and "Conscientious," encomiums that are difficult to reconcile with the missing work issue. In art I had a "Good studio attitude," whatever that means.

But while all of this is interesting, I still wish I could find my Amy Lowell report. I'm sure it would reveal the real me.

Snow is falling, falling, falling; and I am off to drive in it.

I'll be playing music at Stutzman's Cafe this morning. Then I'll come home and stack firewood and do laundry and make bread.

This week I wrote two essays, two articles about teaching poetry, and one western Pennsylvania poem. I also applied for a job that I might actually be qualified for. I realize that's magical thinking.

None of these so-called paragraphs makes a smooth transition into the next, but that's the sort of day it is. Let style reflect reality.

Reason #4,350 for why people who despise political maneuvering can't stop watching it

The narrative is made up of many . . . understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line. . . .

[On Michael Dukakis's speech during the last night of the 1988 Democratic Convention:] "The best speech of his life," David Broder reported. Sandy Grady found it "superb," evoking "Kennedyesque echoes" and showing "unexpected craft and fire." Newsweek had witnessed Michael Dukakis "electrifying the convention with his intensely personal acceptance speech." In fact the convention that evening had been electrified, not by the speech, which was the same series of nonsequential clauses Governor Dukakis had employed during the primary campaign ("My friends . . . son of immigrants . . . good jobs at good wages . . . make teaching a valued and honored profession . . . it's what the Democratic Party is all about"), but because the floor had been darkened, swept with laser beams, and flooded with "Coming to America," played at concert volume with the bass turned up.

[from Joan Didion's essay "Insider Baseball"]