Newest Posts
Sakena Yacoobi and the Afghan Institute of Learning
A little over a year ago I read Greg Mortenson’s Stones into Schools, the sequel to his Three Cups of Tea and was very moved by it. An American, Mortenson describes his work collaborating with Afghan communities to provide schools for girls, while, at the same time, weaving his narrative with Afghan history and the role of education in empowering women and transforming communities. I put the book on my independent reading list for my students and ended up telling a number of people that they had to read...
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
This is a poem for the middle of the night. Here are the first six lines: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things His words make me want to respond in kind. To echo and borrow his...
Collecting and Responding to Poetry with Naomi Shihab Nye
A video arrived in my email box a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of The Academy of American Poets: One excerpt in particular strikes me: I can never imagine how someone would fall in love with poetry and stop reading poems. But I think that people often talk themselves out of a bit of responding, which I also think is as important as collecting. We collect poems that encourage us to think in a way we need to think, or look at the world. But then we also...
A Secret About What a Poem Can Do to Us
I am returning to Antonio Machado’s poem, “Last Night As I Was Sleeping,” because I found yet another interpretation of the poem. In this case, not a different translation but a kind of collaboration with the poem to create something new. Michelle Bloom, a singer songwriter, has taken the poem and transformed it into a song. She’s used Robert Bly’s translation, but then twice, between stanzas, she’s inserted a chorus that she herself has written. She introduces her song this way: Inspired by the idea of making a moment,...
Last Night as I Was Sleeping
Twice recently I have come across this haunting and joyous poem by the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. In the translation by Robert Bly it begins: Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt – a marvelous error! – that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me . . . Looking around a little, I’ve seen some differences in the translation–especially in the second line. The original Spanish word translated as error is ilusion and can...