other deepening places
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Reading Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty stirred up the embers of my Romantic poetry fires. Most importantly, it led to a deeper appreciation for the poetry of John Keats. I have loved his most famous works for years including “Bright Star” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” but I came upon these two wonderful
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July draws to a close, a month bookended by two key celebrations: the birth of America and the birth of my marriage! Between those two memorial stones falls a variety of family trips, community gatherings, and musical gigs that encompass a typical summer with August’s shadow looming. School is just around the corner. Time to
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Rather than post yesterday, we chose to celebrate the Fourth of July with disc golf in the morning, then some quiet time to do crossword puzzles and cryptic quotes from The Epoch Times in the afternoon, followed by time to explore Wolf Creek looking for antique bottles, hot dogs on the grill with chips, baked
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My daughter has turned eighteen. As John Lennon once wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (“Beautiful Boy”). He understood, as a father, how quickly time escapes us. For all of us who have become parents, this truth is painfully real. It drives me more into the present, trying
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Looking at the small shelf of books beside my bed last night, I noticed my copy of David Whyte’s The Bell and the Blackbird. My wife purchased the collection for me a few years ago when I expressed an interest in the book after a colleague introduced me to Whyte’s poetry. If you are familiar
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As I sat in bed last night, debating between Marilynne Robinson’s Home, Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty, or Mary Oliver’s Devotions, I eventually settled on Oliver’s collection of poems. Sleep would be coming quick, so a poem or two felt like a safe bet, especially when Robinson’s novel doesn’t include any chapter breaks (sheer
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Today in British Literature, I reintroduced the “Life is Full of Adventure and Struggle” unit as we began our journey with Frodo Baggins in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. As part of the teaser, I shared Vernon Scannell’s “Nettles” with my students, emphasizing that this poem actually comes from a contemporary poet, not a
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Having missed International Haiku Poetry Day, let me leave you with this three haiku sampler from David M. Bader’s book Haiku U: From Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables as today’s selection for National Poetry Month. As Bader himself notes in his humorous foreword, “Deciding which books to include was difficult, as
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If you’ve followed my blog for the past two years, you will be familiar with Wendell Berry. His Mad Farmer poems have brought such life to my soul (these two years especially). So it’s somewhat surprising that I haven’t posted one of his poems until today during National Poetry Month. However, as I flipped through
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Originally posted on Malcolm Guite: image courtesy of Lancia Smith We come now, on Palm Sunday, to the beginning of Holy Week: a strange Palm Sunday, a strange Holy Week, in which we cannot make the outward and visible journeys and gestures, exchanges and gatherings that have always bodied forth the inner meaning of this…
the deepening ground 