Tag: community
So many mountains
I am very glad I attended “Writing the Rockies” to discuss poetry and place with Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Tom Cable, Corinna McClanahan Schroeder, and many others. Getting there and back involved three flights each way, as well as some mild altitude sickness and…
Elegy for a community reading series
Local honey It is 5:31 in Lexington a Monday after magnolia and before honeysuckle the second week of Spring Term’s sugar drip and I am driving the hospital road to Kroger in my dogwood-dirty Hyundai with green dents to pick up strawberries, lemonade, pre-sliced…
Professor Aragorn swears a vow
Manifestos are for angry young men, right? I’m more like “cranky” and “middle-aged,” and as far gender stereotyping goes, I actually had a student write on a course evaluation once, “Just as kind as you’d expect from a mother.” Whippersnapper, if you’re out there,…
The exquisite hush I require, being a sensitive artist
“So how’s it going at your writer’s resort?” my son keeps asking, and you should definitely hear pre-teen sarcasm in those italics. I packed skepticism in my suitcase, actually, nested in there with books I didn’t use and tea I would brew in enormous…
Searching for habitable planets
Otherworldly poetry is an adaptable traveler—it can thrive in many climates and habitats—but the new science fiction-themed issue of the New Yorker does not, apparently, possess a life-sustaining atmosphere. My favorite reading bandwidth is slipstream, new fabulism, whatever you call it: that place on…
Points on my poetic license
I have a guilty sense that I’ve deluded people, cast up a falsely shimmering mirage of the Productive Poet-Scholar-Teacher, when someone asks how I get so much done. I feel perpetually behind, anxious about what I should have finished but haven’t started yet, and…
Heroes in trouble
My baseball-playing-son’s choice of “Casey at the Bat” for school recitation made sense. I noticed in his practice sessions that he read the line “Kill the umpire!” with intense personal feeling; he tossed off “That ain’t my style” a little less confidently, but he…
Community’s opposite
English departments are “hostile territory, dangerous turf.” That’s from an essay by George Garrett, but that notion permeates the 1970 collection Writers as Teachers: Teachers as Writers, edited by Jonathan Baumbach. Bill Manhire told me that he picked up this book in the early…
