After a year’s sabbatical, I am resuming my duties, one of which includes being the advisor of the Tolkien Society. The group gathers regularly to hear talks, forge chain armor, attend masked balls (not that there are any masked balls in Lord of the Rings), and engage in other Medieval-related activities. I’ll mark the occasion […]
Tag Archives: adolescence
Why Didn’t Poetry Save Neil from Suicide?
Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Antigone, Dead Poets Society, English teachers, Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Weir, Sophocles, suicide, teaching, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Poetry vs. the Decline of Civilization
I was listening to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion this past weekend and marveling yet again at his ability to pull me into his stories about the Lake Woebegone citizenry. His account of a school field trip may have been a summer repeat—I’m not sure because I came into the program late. In any […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged A. E. Houseman, Garrison Keillor, Loveliest of Trees, poetry Comments closed
On Elves and a Botched Love Letter
Since I’ve been writing a lot about the longing for lost innocence in the past few weeks, I’ll share a couple of personal stories about the subject. Included are a traumatic creative writing experience that drove me away forever from writing serious poetry again and a very strange moment in my courtship of the woman […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged How to Treat Elves, loss of innocence, love, Morris Bishop, Tempest, William Shakespeare Comments closed
