The Poetry of Transitions: How to Splurge on a Holiday Weekend

Today it seems to me that nurturing poetry skills is a bit like childrearing: If your kiddo grows up well enough and heads out into the world, you don't say it's because you learned something in the last week and that made it all work out. It's the long haul, the small things like food allergies and birthday cakes and helping the unexperienced hand to shape a perfect O or the teen to question and improve an essay. It's being willing to let them try evenings in town with friends, and not flinching (much) when you accidentally overhear those first romantic diversions. No parent can do a perfect job -- we're human -- but bringing a child to maturity, reasonably healthy and brave and independent, is worth the years leading up to that.

When THRESHOLDS is published in February 2026, I expect I'll feel much the same way about that. But there's always the next poem and wanting it to be better, and that's a difference, for sure. Most of us don't start a second family, just to see whether we can do it better ... or have I missed something?

At any rate,  I opted to spend most of my Labor Day weekend pinned to my seat in Zoom'd poetry classes led  by five outstanding poets. There's still one more class to go, tomorrow. For the evening I'll be mulling over the lessons this afternoon about the power of short poems (if you want them to have power). It amazed me that I recognized the first poem that the teaching poet offered, an anonymous one:

“Western wind, when wilt thou blow/That the small rain down can rain/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!”

And it amazed me even more to find online material from a class taught by Allen Ginsberg, opening with that very poem. Incredible to discover what those students were then exposed to. Check it out here. 

Okay, I'm off to scribble a bit. Or peel some of today's apples. Or take a walk first. Yep, that sounds about right. One beautiful day to be a poet, looking at life's transitions and wondering how to spill them and rearrange them in words on a page.