other deepening places
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“What will your verse be?” Mr. Keating, Dead Poets Society When I officially introduced my students to free verse last week, I knew that Walt Whitman would be on the menu. In my search for a shorter example, I came across the poem I first heard under the wise tutelage of Mr. Keating from Dead…
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On our most recent shopping excursion, my wife shared with me that classic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem Christmas Bells. I’ve been familiar with the poem for years, more through the variety of interpretations the poem has experienced in song, but the power of Longfellow’s words themselves ring loud and clear. As I sat in the…
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“1ife: the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body” from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/life We have been duped into accepting something as life that by definition is not. Fear, the most infectious disease spreading across the globe, has crippled us. The prescription: isolation. Look at the empty stands of sporting events (where they…
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Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right? I apologize for my lack of activity on The Deepening Ground recently. Over the last two weeks, I’ve spent little time nurturing my poetic soul. Rather I’ve finished the flooring in our addition, ripped sixteen foot boards with a friend for the trim, and finished work on my…
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As the fullness of life in such uncommon times (exacerbated by the extra work required of me on our addition) continues to absorb much of my bandwidth, my mind stumbled back to a poem my wife wrote over a year ago reflecting on one of the most common occurrences of a common day: making the…
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Tonight as I read to my two youngest sons from C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one of Lucy’s lines cut to the quick. I had to stop and take a picture of it with my phone, lest I forget it. I’ve read the novel multiple times, but tonight these words rang more true than ever.…
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“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” Leonardo da Vinci My thanks to Jack Warner, former colleague and cooperating teacher, for introducing me to one of Pittsburgh’s hidden gems, The Mattress Factory Art Museum. Since that initial visit almost twenty years ago, I’ve…
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Autumn was in the air this morning! Here in Western Pennsylvania, the temperature bottomed out at 49 degrees Fahrenheit, a delectable foretaste of Fall. For me, it is THE best season of the year, full of harvest, campfires, the warming palette of the changing leaves, and pumpkin everything. I never grow tired of pumpkin! There’s…
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“As the season is now fast approaching when every man must expect to be drawn into the field of action, it is highly necessary that he should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a noble cause we are engaged in, it is the cause of virtue and mankind, every…
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Rudyard Kipling’s If has been one of those poems (a deepening ground) I regularly return to, especially in difficult times. As a father of six, I would hope my children could aspire to the quality of life that Kipling captures in this 32-line poem of conditional statements. This is anaphora at its best! It’s a…
