Friday, February 23, 2007

I suppose that from time to time it's a good idea to post photos, art, etc. But this is really just a trial run to see if I know how to do it. Anyway, this is me. Hello.

Welcome to my blog

I have wanted to start this blog for some time. A lot of other writers, many of them friends, have their own. Monkey see, monkey do. How hard can it be? I asked myself. But my self said, "just what you need, bonehead, another project."

But, alas, I never learn. So here we are.

But seriously, I consider this an extension of my writing and teaching, another way to share what I'm enthused, angry, excited, or pleased about.

Today a former student, Sophie Klahr, asked her teachers for poems that moved us when we were younger. She is designing a poetry project for teens. I wrote to her that I may have been an especially morbid adolescent (though I don't really think so), and that the first poem that rocked me back on my heels was Keats' sonnet, "When I Have Fears". It's as good a place as any to begin this blog:

When I Have Fears


When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

John Keats