Today's icon is a quote from George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose poem "So we'll go no more a-roving" was my pick for my most recent Poetry Friday post. Of course, in providing you all with additional commentary on Friday, I've set my brainradio to a nearly continual loop of the song "The Maid of Amsterdam", which I find myself enjoying quite a bit. I ( Read more... )

Today I hung out in Doylestown, PA with the former RC of the Eastern Pennsylvania Region of the Jane Austen Society. We had a wee bit of official business to do at the bank, then a delicious lunch, and then some shopping at a wonderful used book store. Where I scored a first edition, first printing of Robert Frost's West-Running Brook for a mere $ ( Read more... )

As I've said previously, writing free verse is not as simple as taking regular sentences and breaking them into bite-sized bits. Nevermind that there are teachers out there telling kids to do just that. Not all teachers, certainly. But they exist. And they are well-intentioned people who are trying hard to share the joy of poetry with kids (or at ( Read more... )

Being in New England - and particularly in New Hampshire - puts me in mind of one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost. He worked not far from here, about an hour north near Franconia Notch, close to the shadow of the Old Man of the Mountain before he slid to his doom. I visited there a few summers back, and posted about his house and the property ( Read more... )

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This morning, I had to drive S to school because she opted to stay home and finish a bit of homework she'd forgotten rather than take the bus that comes an hour before school opens. (I don't quarrel with her decision, which was sound, or with her priorities, which were to spend all last night studying for a major unit test in Spanish, and I enjoy ( Read more... )

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The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard ( Read more... )

Frost, that is.

Today, in 1874, Robert Frost was born. According to my Poetry Speaks Poem-A-Day calendar that juliewinkler gave me, as a professor, he was a rule-breaker. He held informal talks in his home rather than lecturing, and gave exams only because he was required to. His tests were simple. One consisted of a single question: "What good di my ( Read more... )

Last night it dipped into the single digits here -- a sudden temperature plunge compliments of Canada, I suppose, even colder than the forecasters warned us it would be. They'd predicted lows in the high teens, with windchills colder still; but the starting temperatures were closer to zero than they'd said, and the windchills were not a positive ( Read more... )