From the category archives:

Poetry

“Try to See It My Way” (Writers and Negative Capability)

October 13, 2010

Image by Getty Images via @daylife “The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own.” —Leo Stein, American art collector and critic In an 1817 letter to a friend, the poet John Keats describes one of the qualities that makes writers [...]

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A Pocketful of Prosody

April 30, 2010

I love poetry, and as a high school English teacher, I would like my students to enjoy it as much as I do. While this may be an inherently futile endeavor, I continue to fight the good fight anyway and make pitches for my favorite poems and poets. If I’m lucky, the students who’ve learned [...]

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Writers Write!

April 14, 2010

The poem below is inspired by the day to day minutia experienced by writers that have every great intention of writing but things gets in the way. Fortunately, I was able to stop myself this week to get this poem finally out of my head. Let me know how you are moving along with your [...]

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Poetry 1-2-3, Easy as Writing About a Tree!

February 10, 2010

There is really no “rhyme or reason” on how to write a good poem. Most people think of poetry as short creative pieces with rhythm, stanzas or some musical flow. However, many strong poems are written that do not rhyme at all. The Haiku poem is a great example of this. My love of poetry [...]

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Poetic Pain: Teaching Poetry to High Schoolers

January 8, 2010

Image by Micheo via Flickr During the holidays, I met up with a longtime friend who, like me, teaches high school English. He told me that he was going to be teaching a semester-long poetry class at his school, and he asked if I had any suggestions. Here’s what I said: Pick poems that you [...]

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