The Poetry Lady’s FAQs

A web site is not really a complete web site these days, unless it offers a set of FAQs. I don’t know when FAQ became part of our common parlance, but there it is: short, clunky — rather unpoetic if I do say so myself.
Nonetheless, I feel it’s time that I created my own list [...]

Valentine’s Day Week In Poetry

Photo by Aja Riggs

Monday … for Valentine’s day the students in my morning class wrote love poems … or at least poems to our loved ones. We read some of Pablo Neruda’s poems from his lovely, slim volume: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Neruda’s poems draw on images of the sea and nature. [...]

When Chicken McNugget is an Adjective

Last week we wrote about dreams. My students’ poems were serious and heartfelt. Dare I say … pedestrian? They dreamed of getting their GEDs and being the best mothers in the world. That’s lovely … moving even … but where were the metaphors? Where was the imagistic writing? Shouldn’t dreams by their very nature be [...]

Five Ways of Looking at a Poetry Class

I.
I bring in two poems: Langston Hughes’ Dream Variations, and He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats. It’s too much material for an hour-long class. Especially since I also want to touch on Dream Deferred and MLK’s I Have a Dream speech.  
The night before class I dreamed that I saw Barack [...]