For this week’s Teaching & Learning tip, Lars Larson, English, suggests reading Margaret Renkl’s recent New York Times piece “Thank God for the Poets”:
Deep in the bloom of spring, we are all tired from a hard year. Here in National Poetry Month, Renkl’s short essay invites instructors to reflect on the role of the lyric in their lives and lectures. While not directly about teaching, the piece is about suffering, solace, and the ongoing role of beauty in your life – all of which infuse our teaching. As Renkl concludes, poets “help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.”
The article includes a shout-out to Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones”, which the editors of Writers magazine – UP’s student-run creative writing journal – chose for its 2021 theme. (Note that a launch party and reading of this year’s volume will take place via Zoom from 6-8 pm on Founders Day, April 20.)
And if today you lack the time for reading the article, then at least absorb four lines Renkl cites from Amanda Gorman’s shimmering inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb”: “Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: / That even as we grieved, we grew, / That even as we hurt, we hoped, / That even as we tired, we tried.”