A colorful baby boy’s room. A quiet fishing lake. A tight-knit urban neighborhood. A woman’s steady arms. A lively street in NYC. These are the places where the inmates of ACJ want to be. Places they want to remember, places they choose to re-create. As each man reads his piece to the class, I start …
Mr. Eagleton is scheduling his classes according to the National Weather Service. He’s not from here. So he comes into my room, and asks me about “the rainy season”. He doesn’t have any shades on his windows, so his plans to show movies on days when it’s overcast. Depending on where you are in the …
From the beginning of Western literature, there has been a dual attitude toward the source of poetry. The ancient Greeks saw the poet as a maker, and they also had the tradition of the poem being a gift from the muse. The poem is simultaneously made by the poet and it is given by a …
Just a couple of weeks ago my American friend AZ suggested we should go to a Pirates game. At first, the idea didn’t appeal to me. “The sport is like rocket science to me,” I said. “I don’t know how to watch a baseball game.” This is true. My American friends have tried to teach …
I taught my first creative writing class at the ACJ (Allegheny County Jail) this week. I thought I’d be nervous but the moment the fifteen male inmates walk into the room and sit in a circle, I feel calm, comfortable, eager. I suppose that’s how a teacher should feel approaching his/her first class. The inmates …
Let’s talk about where poetry comes from… or at least where one poem came from. I offer one of my own, not because it is an example of a great poem (it isn’t), but because I know the situation out of which it arose. For a period of time a few summers ago, I kept a notebook in …
“I share a cell with another guy. It’s more like a bathroom. There’s a sink and a toilet, and where a bathtub would normally be is our bed. It’s horrible,” one of the inmates says. “Gosh” I say, eyes wide, trying to imagine living in such a small space. Big things come in small packages. …
Nowadays, many poets learn their craft in creative writing classes. We call them workshops in order, I suppose, to suggest a correlation with wood-carving or perhaps clock- making. And the best teachers do a great service to the students by emphasizing how a poem works, as well as how it could work better. As valuable …