If you’re thinking about branding and how to market your school (and who isn’t these days?) then it’s good to have a strong agreed upon sense of who you are, how you show who you are and what people actually think. Where are you? So try this quick test with your board, your admin team and the faculty. You can…
No one was surprised. The kindergarten discovered. Quite electrifying. The end of the year party.
Some poems capture my attention because they have the twin virtues of being grounded in historical reality and yet reach for and succeed in suggesting a grander and future vision. This poem is about the arrival of the first Europeans in New Zealand. It’s about a bloody encounter and the clash of cultures. It’s a poem of heroic celebration but without…
The English Department was in uproar. The head of school found it helpful. The faculty was concerned. An experiment in interdisciplinary learning. Miss Greenaway knew better. The faculty luncheon got a little out of hand.
Tweet Tweet There’s a blackbird in my mango tree and I think of Marley and singing songs of freedom I have followed birds from hills to home and back wondering where was Zion but now I am content on this verandah the blackbirds come to my mango tree and sing home is always where it’s meant to be I am…
Some culinary disasters can be repurposed. Here is Glen Baxter on polenta: And then there are times when you just have to cut your losses. Some poems just write themselves. Here is Carolyn Kizer writing – ranting and venting might be more accurate – about a Craig Claiborne recipe she tried from the NY Times. It probably didn’t help her…
Russian – American Romance In my land and yours they do hit the hay and sleep the whole night in a similar way. There’s the golden Moon with a double shine. It lightens your land and it lightens mine. At the same low price, that is for free, there’s the sunrise for you and the sunset for me. The wind…
Here again – for the summer solstice – are those Wittenham Clumps. By the early 1940s Nash’s was in declining health. Suffering from chronic asthma – triggered his wife Margaret believed by inhaling gas at Passchendaele in 1917 – he had endured several spells in hospital. He and Margaret, began to make visits to nearby Boars Hill where their friend Hilda Harrison lived…
Home no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger…
Forget the mother of all bombs and the father of all mankind – here is the ultimate parent of all apologies. Just look at this great list as the poet slyly moves from the serious to the playful, from the abstract to the mundane, from the burden to the lightweight. It’s an insistence on going on living and enjoying small…
“My boy you should go in for nature.” Sir William Richmond’s advice to Paul Nash on reviewing some of his early drawings. One of Paul Nash’s friends at the Slade School of Art was Claughton Pellew-Harvey who “had a deep love for the country, particularly for certain of its features, such as ricks and stooks of corn.” At first I…
Poltroon – the very word is like a … what? a.) A North American mammal of the raccoon family known for its habit of rooting for grubs in the undergrowth of deciduous forests b.) A metal or earthenware pot typically having a funnel-shaped top, often kept under the bed c.) An abject or contemptible coward, lacking courage; ignobly timid and faint-hearted. The Poltroon…
Did you have a special place as a child? Perhaps somewhere secret and magical? A corner of a city park, a place in the garden, somewhere under the trees or behind the shed? Do you have one now? For the artist Paul Nash his first special place was Kensington Gardens, in west London, near where he was born in 1889.…
The Dancers All day beneath the hurtling shells Before my burning eyes Hover the dainty demoiselles — The peacock dragon-flies. Unceasingly they dart and glance Above the stagnant stream — And I am fighting here in France As in a senseless dream. A dream of shattering black shells That hurtle overhead, And dainty dancing demoiselles Above the dreamless dead. …
Do you have any favorite poems about trains and train journeys? I was compiling such a list – the way one does on a rainy Tuesday in June – when I discovered this gem from C. K Chesterton. What a delightful put down of a very annoying verse that’s been stuck in my head since I was about eight. An…