when it is time again to teach I turn to the poets

and, always, there, I find what I didn't know I was searching for.

In the dark hours of this cloudy day, just ahead of the morning I will spend with the seventh graders of Project Flow at Philadelphia's Water Works, I turned to Kate Northrop, Stanley Kunitz, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, and Greg Djanikian and found:

* a title that leads me toward a game
* a scene that leads me toward a prompt
* a pair of divine metaphors
* a myth that will inspire myths

Whoever thinks poetry is superfluous has not spent a morning with children.

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On meeting Ted Kooser in a hotel lobby

I knew he'd be in Appleton, and I saw him, from time to time—a thorough gentleman without an arrogant air in the hotel lobby where the writers were staying. It isn't my way to interfere, to barge in, to announce. It was right enough with me that this former poet laureate was somewhere near.

But then the morning of my last day in Wisconsin, the elevator doors slid open and he was exiting while I was entering and I couldn't help it, I said: "I read your poems to my mother in the final days of her life. It brought us both comfort." He could not have been kinder, but I wasn't surprised. The kindness is in Ted Kooser's poems.

... Across the ice she swooped
and then turned back and, halfway, bent her legs
and leapt into the air the way a crane leaps, blue gloves
lifting her lightly, and turned a snappy half-turn
there in the wind before coming down, arms wide,
skating backward right out of that moment, smiling
back at the woman she'd been just an instant before.

(from "Skater," by Ted Kooser, Delights & Shadows)

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Merry Christmas

This is the New York Public Library lion in holiday repose, and this, my blogging friends, is my wish for you over the next few days: A cozy chair, a full moon, a favorite story or a brand-new one. Sometimes I think that all the rushing around we do each holiday season is designed to make us grateful for the pure sitting down we have earned for the afterwards. I plan to get reaquainted with a few dear poets—Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, James Wright, Ted Kooser. I'll finish this week's New Yorker (this week it's the piece on the dramatic editing of Raymond Carver that haunts). I'll sneak inside my favorite independent for a few new titles before it closes today at noon, and perhaps I'll read The Legacy of Ashes, just to keep up with my CIA-fascinated son.

I have earned my stories. You have earned your stories.

Peace be with you.

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