30 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem - "The Field" - is by the young Israeli poet Efrat Mishori.



You can find information about her and her poetry here.

28 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem is by Meir Wieseltier. Wieseltier is a renowned Israeli poet. The translator of the poem, "On Wonders," is Shirley Kaufman, a well-known Israeli-American poet in her own right.

Questions? Comments? Please post here.

21 April 2008 Poem

The poem for today's class is by Margaret Gibson, who writes absolutely luscious poems (including one about mangoes that, to my tastes, rates among the sexiest poems of all time) and who was my teacher.



One of the reasons I chose "Postcards in March" for class today is that it expresses a sense of a very concrete audience with carefully selected language. This is the degree of attention you should pay to audience in your papers and it's the topic of today's class.

Please feel free to comment here with questions or observations you may have about the poem.

16 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem is "Among School Children" by William Butler Yeats.

Here're some useful annotations.

14 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem is by M. L. Smoker.

I chose it because I think it's such a great poem for the way it feels when the seasons start to change—that kind of intensified attention we pay to the world around us, the way everything is responding to the change.

I also think it deals, as a poem, with one of the problems of poetry well—how to account for the poet in a poem about the world. I don't know if I'm expressing that well. Basically, I think there's this tension in a lot of poems between the small universe of one person's perceptions and the large universe that she or he perceives.

Any questions, observations, please comment here.