Having a March Madness bracket for poems provided excitement for kids and enlightenment for this teacher.
Monthly Archives: March 2021
March Madness Is Divinest Sense (Sort of)
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Gate A-4", "Hill We Climb", "Still I Rise", "Those Winter Sundays", "Two-Headed Calf", "World Is a Beautiful Place", Amanda Gorman, Laura Gilpin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, March Madness, Maria Konnikova, Maya Angelou, Naomi Shihab Nye, Robert Hayden Comments closed
Mothers with a Mind of Their Own
Anyone with an elderly parents–and anyone with a three-year-old–will related to Milne’s “James James Morrison Morrison.”
Freed Like a Beached Whale
Our spirits have curiously been lifted by the freeing of the Ever Given. Various whale poems come to mind.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Humpbacks", Ever Given, Mary Oliver, Scott Bates, shipping, Whales Comments closed
Plague Lit on Life Returning to Normal
Plague Lit teaches us how people behave DURING plagues. How about how they behave when life returns to normal? Camus may be best on this.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Albert Camus, COVID-19, Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, Last Man, Mary Shelley, plague Comments closed
Choosing the Desert over Bondage
Marge Piercy’s “Maggid” is a powerful Passover poem about the courage it takes to abandon what is familiar.
Haaland and Silko’s Laguna Pueblo Vision
The new Secretary of the Interior comes from the same tribe as novelist Leslie Marmon Silko and appears to hold the same view of the earth.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Ceremony, Deb Haaland, Environmentalism, Laguna Pueblo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Native Americans, public lands Comments closed
A Stuck Ship, a Pound of Flesh
The Evergreen cargo ship, stuck in the Suez canal, brings to mind a Shylock passage from “Merchant of Venice.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Evergreen, Merchant of Venice, predatory loans, shipping, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Why I Think the Way I Think
I survey my intellectual history, especially the evolution of my thinking about literature’s impact on human behavior.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Antonio Gramsci, Beowulf, Carl Jung, Carleton College, Hans Robert Jauss, Harper Lee, Huckleberry Finn, intellectual history, J. Paul Hunter, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jerome Beaty, Karl Marx, Literary Theory, Madame Bovary, Mark Twain, New Criticism, Norman Holland, Percy Bysshe Shelley, racism, Reader Response Theory, reception theory, Sigmund Freud, Terry Eagleton, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tobias Smollett Comments closed
