June 10, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – June
But does poetry actually change anything? Does it need to? Maybe poets are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Or maybe W.H. Auden is right that […]
November 11, 2016
“We need to know how to go about reaching the next days of our lives”
Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” is going around again. W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is circling through social media, as it did after September 11. Why do we turn to poems […]
June 30, 2014
A Tournament of Hunchbacks
Last month, at the University of Michigan, I took part in a faculty institute on pedagogy and the arts. We shared teaching strategies and classroom can-you-believe-its. (One professor reported a […]