As a student and young reader, I am often inundated with syllabi and must-read lists that beat me over the head with the “essentials.” One can only be told to read Twain, Austen, Faulkner, Dickens, and Hemingway so many times before one itches to rebel. What else is out there? There have to be other…
Read More "8 Latin American Authors and Poets You Need to Read"
Poetry selections in high school are too often limited to a hallowed few—Shakespeare and Petrarch, Whitman and Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and perhaps Billy Collins—if poetry is included at all. While these canonized favorites can enhance any unit of study, they can leave students feeling like poetry is a thing of the past, which…
Read More "5 Contemporary Poets to Teach in the High School Classroom"
The poet W. S. Merwin passed away on March 15, marking the conclusion to a long and richly productive life. His body of poetry proves difficult to sum up. Over the course of his seven decades of writing, Merwin changed again and again, in style and tone and subject.
The beloved American poet Mary Oliver (1935–2019) died today, leaving behind a rich and vast body of literary work. Oliver was arguably the most popular poet of her generation, best known for her poems of the natural world. Her style is quickly recognizable; at once sublime and grounded, her language conveys sweeping spiritual states through…
Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney, "The most important Irish poet since Yeats," passed away in Dublin early this morning. He was 74. In the short time since his death, tributes have poured in from all over the globe. But all eyes are on the people of Ireland, whose loss of a national treasure is deeply…
Four adaptations of poems set to music: some tender, some bizarre, all personal homages to poems and their masters. Enjoy! "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" by Emily Dickinson Composed by Israeli singer-songwriter Efrat Ben Zur.
