“The world stifles imagination” Read how seven writers who work handle it.
For all you writers who work full-time, you’re not alone!
16 Thursday Dec 2021
Posted in Blog
Tag Archives: Teaching
Why Teaching Poetry Is So Important
13 Sunday Apr 2014
Posted in Blog
Here is an excerpt from a great article in The Atlantic. Read the rest here.
Students who don’t like writing essays may like poetry, with its dearth of fixed rules and its kinship with rap. For these students, poetry can become a gateway to other forms of writing. It can help teach skills that come in handy with other kinds of writing—like precise, economical diction, for example. When Carl Sandburg writes, “The fog comes/on little cat feet,” in just six words, he endows a natural phenomenon with character, a pace, and a spirit. All forms of writing benefits from the powerful and concise phrases found in poems.
The Decline and Fall of the English Major
24 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in Blog
Tags
Article, Editorial, education, Fiction, news, poem, Poet, Poetry, Publishing, School, Teaching, writers, Writing
In the past few years, I’ve taught nonfiction writing to undergraduates and graduate students at Harvard, Yale, Bard, Pomona, Sarah Lawrence and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Each semester I hope, and fear, that I will have nothing to teach my students because they already know how to write. And each semester I discover, again, that they don’t.
They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.
That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.
This is a great article read the rest at the nytimes.com
the poet's billow 