Sondra’s prompt and Palmeri have me thinking about what it means to be a poet and a teacher (or poet-teacher, a compound word I’ve come to like as a way of describing my occupation–not a teacher of poetry, at least not exclusively, but a poet who teaches/a teacher who writes poems). Poet-teachers, I believe, are curators–both on the page and in the classroom. Great poems have a cumulative quality about them; meaning develops in the spaces between images, confessions, pronouncements, questions. This happens in the classrooms of poet-teachers, too. We are often mystified by how the pieces we present (meant to unsettle, to disrupt) find ways of coming together. We are not surprised by this; our students are smart, creative beings. We are in awe of them.
