Ms. Nancy's Library Blog

“The Mysterious Human Heart” by Matthew Dickman The produce in New York is really just produce, oranges and cabbage, celery and beets, pomegranates with their hundred seeds, carrots and honey, walnuts and thirteen varieties of apples. On Monday morning I will walk down to the market with my heart inside me, mysterious, something I will [...]

[Read more →]

“When you hit a wall, just kick it in.” — Patti Smith

[Read more →]

“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.” — William Butler Yeats

[Read more →]

“The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on.” — Emily Dickinson

[Read more →]

“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.” — John Ashbery

[Read more →]

“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement… says heaven and earth in one word… speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not [...]

[Read more →]

“Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” — Plato

[Read more →]

“Weather Report” by Lilian Moore Pinging rain stinging sleet tonight. Frost at dawn bright sun in the morning. Ice-bearing trees, a glass orchard, blinking sunwinking. A noonwind will pass, harvesting the brittle crop crashing clinking. —————————– Rain by Sigbjorn Obstfelder (Translated from the Norwegian by Sarah J. Hails) “One is one, and two is two- [...]

[Read more →]

for G. and all my students. I’ll miss you guys. xo – Ms. Nancy “The Open Door” ~ Elizabeth Coatsworth Out of the dark to the sill of the door lay the snow in a long unruffled floor, and the lamplight fell narrow and thin a carpet unrolled for the cat to walk in. Slowly, [...]

[Read more →]

“Drinking Fountain” “When I climb up To get a drink It doesn’t work The way you’d think. I turn it up. The water goes And hits me right Upon the nose. I turn it down To make it small And don’t get any Drink at all.” – Marchette Chute Is it time for school to [...]

[Read more →]