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Beginner's Heart

I grew up moving. And losing things — as the Elizabeth Bishop villanelle I posted earlier reminds us, the art of losing isn’t hard to master. Except, of course, it is… Yesterday two of my sisters finally emptied an old dresser of my mother’s. Inside were old letters, photos, and ephemera from all over the…

Having spent many years teaching at the ‘higher ed’ level (re: college), I feel qualified to say that the system is sick. Fattened on the blood of adjuncts, centred far too often on the desires of faculty and a profit-driven administration over the needs of students, it’s a system way past overripe. Think piece of…

I’m spending this week w/ the most wonderful professionals in the world: teachers. Yep. Teachers. We get a bad rap these days.  But nowhere will you find men & women more committed to the future of America: our kids. Who else will work 60+ hours a week (yes; they really do) to make sure every…

I am a sister. Sometimes I feel like I should preface that statement as they do in AA: Hi. My name is Britton and I’ve been a sister for all but a scant three years of my life. I don’t think I’ll ever recover… My sisters are my best friends. It figures, since we moved…

Seamus Heaney — Nobel Laureate that he is — doesn’t get the attention in popular poetry circles that folks like Dickinson and Frost do. And yet he’s a wonderful poet — a people’s poet as well as a poet’s poet. His craft is amazing (how does he DO it??), and his content familiar to anyone…

If you’ve read any of this blog, you know I’m nuts about tea. Crazy, obsessive, elitist (and possibly boring) on the topic. Poetry, too. I have almost as many tea ‘cookbooks’ as favourite poets. There are six tea sets in the china cabinet,  including two hand-painted by my grandmother, who also loved tea sets. That…

During my master’s, I was besotted with the poet Robert Hayden. I read every one of his poems, all his prose, the critical biography on him, and the few scholarly articles available. I still think he is the most under-appreciated of great American poets. Hayden’s work had an enormous impact on me. He moved deftly…

 There’s a tendency to think of poetry as not much fun. Unless you’re a total nerd/ geek/ dork… Or (as I heard said recently in a venue I would never have expected to hear the term) a pointy-head. Re: intellectual. NOT ordinary folks… It’s not true, of course. Children love poetry, until we ruin it…

 Elizabeth Bishop is another poet who is easy to love. She makes her art almost invisible, effortless. Like those invisible zippers that hold the pieces together… This is a poem I return to again & again. It’s a villanelle — an old & demanding form. In Bishop’s hands, it seems like conversation…And it has everything…

One of the earliest poems I remember reading that voiced opposition to the war in Việt Nam was Denise Levertov’s ‘What Were They Like?’ I read it years ago at a reading of poets who had influenced the readers. I’m reading it next week at a Poets for Peace reading.  Perhaps because I grew up in Việt…
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