I'm currently teaching a 3 week intensive poetry class, and every day I am afforded the luxury of settling down with a handful of poems and delighting in the language, the themes, the style, and the overall emotion. Today we read Emily Dickinson, a favorite of mine since I took an undergraduate seminar that explored her poetry in Massachusetts, and Walt Whitman, whose long lines and frank images are impossible to ignore. To delight in words, to treasure that effusive or contained emotion or image on the page, to feel "the top of my head fly off," well, that is a blessing indeed. And to share that joy with 9 students who are engaged and serious and silly, well, it almost seems a shame that they're paying me for so much pleasure.
"I dwell in Possibility
A fairer House than Prose."
Emily Dickinson
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