Critical Commentary
TEACHER:
Adult workshops:
“You help everyone in the classroom become a star, and you radiate such light and inspire creativity. You do that with your mind, your heart, and your skill at reaching into people’s lives and pulling out the good earth in them.”
“I cannot begin to tell you how very much I enjoyed the poetry challenges, your ability to work with poets who are in different places in their lives and writings, and your extraordinary talent for being a teacher.”
“You never fail to inspire me to write poems that I didn’t know I had within me.”
School residencies:
“I truly love your manner with the students. I particularly admire the way you help them find ways to not settle for the easy response, but to look inside to connect to something meaningful.”
“I love what you do with the kids, but more than that, you make me want to sit down and write as well. You ‘push’ them in the nicest way possible. They can read your body language and know that you are on their side. You make them feel like they can do it and that they are successful when they try. You make them feel like they have something to say and that everyone wants to hear it. You make them feel like writers, like poets.”
POET/WRITER
“Your poems come out of a real place of grind and chop, and flow and halt and go, of a living heart in true engagement with inner and outer things.”
“There’s a little ‘aah’ that slips out of the rapt audience when you nail what they thought they thought—though really it was your thought, presented perfectly, and so understandably that it hits them like a memory instead of the gift of your idea.”
“You weave beautiful stories into your poems. They are centered and honest and graceful. I can’t thank you enough for bringing poetry, simply poetry.”
“Your poetry has a certitude of interiority about it that could only come from someone who has done some homework, who has crossed some internal bridges.”
