Pencil into your brackets the Loyola Greyhounds.

The Maryland college last went to the NCAA Tournament in 1994, and may not cause many people to pick them to win its first game, but the Greyhounds hunkered down on defense to beat the Fairfield stags 48-44 in the men's championship game of the MAAC Tournament last night.


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I understand that the UMass basketball team is having a good season this year. When I first visited UMass, it was the spring of 1996, and I remember barns in Hadley had messages scrawled on them supporting the basketball team during their Final Four run. "We love you, Marcus Camby" and "Go UMass." I moved to Amherst in the fall and I remember ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I got a call from the Dean of First-Year Students at WNEU. She told me that a student in one of my classes died in a car accident Sunday night. The student, Emily Weston, was from Hatfield and had graduated from the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts charter school in South Hadley. She was a commuter student at WNEU. When the dean mentioned ( Read more... )

Quick thought amidst the grading. I'm working on grading student essays on the Shakespeare tragedy Othello today. In one of the options I gave to my students, they examine Othello's speeches in the beginning, middle and end of the play to trace the change in Othello's character that we see in the play. I was reading one essay that observed that ( Read more... )

In the film Howl, Allen Ginsburg (as portrayed by James Franco) talks about the poet as prophet. Prophecy is not, he says, about "knowing that the bomb is going to drop in 1942," but instead it's about "touching a common key." It's about expressing an idea or feeling that someone else will think or feel 100 years from now, and perhaps putting some ( Read more... )

I talked to my students on Tuesday about Billy Collins' poem, "Introduction to Poetry." I like the poem because it talks about how to approach poetry. In fact there are six metaphors in the poem about poetry or how to read poetry. The first five are how he would like his students to approach a poem.

1. Reading poetry = holding a color slide up to the ( Read more... )

I graded papers today. Close readings. "The Lottery," "Greasy Lake," "Harrison Bergeron," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Parable of the Prodigal Son," "A & P." Not bad. I need to grade more. I should be downstairs doing that now, but I'm procrastinating. And what am I doing? Thinking of potential adventures to go on with A. tomorrow. It's supposed to be ( Read more... )

Burns' birthday is coming up on Tuesday and I plan to don my kilt to teach my classes at WNEC. I just put together a little packet of poems and a guide for them to read to prepare for Tuesday's class. I included this YouTube video of a reading of "To a Mouse." It's appropriate, given the weather we've been having lately, to have a phrase at hand ( Read more... )

I'm signed up to teach a community education course at GCC in October called "The Locally Grown Sonnet." It's on the poetry of nineteenth century Greenfield resident Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, the man whose name is on the plaque on the Poets Seat Tower. The course will run three Thursday evenings, from 6:30 to 8:30, on Oct. 7, 14, and 21, ( Read more... )

When I first heard W.D. Snodgrass reading his poem, "After Experience Taught Me...", on the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast, I covered my eyes with my hands. I was walking my dog, I think. It's a very viscerally disturbing poem, as Snodgrass relates a military combat instructor teaching his soldier-students how to kill a man with their bare hands by ( Read more... )