1. Douglas Rothschild’s Theogeny.  Douglas’s poetic family tree comes from second- and third-wave Language poets and fourth- and fifth-wave New York School.  That’s his poetic DNA. The result, however, is a kind of poem that is straightforward, found, outsider, schooled, subversive, arch, and tender, often all at the same time. In person, even Douglas would admit he’s a complete eccentric (just look at the above photo, taken from his book launch, all zoot suited and making rolls out of quarters for one of his jobs, running a couple of laundromats); he is also a died-in-wool poet.  I’m hard-pressed to think of a post-Language, post-NY Schooler who can write a poem feeling and human/e presence.

2. Sage Cohen’s Writing the Life Poetic. Imagine a cross of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms, and Jeffrey Yamaguchi’s 52 Projects, and you have Writing the Life Poetic. If you are teaching poetry to high school or undergraduate students, I suggest you consider adopting this puppy. Check out the book’s website here.

I used to think it was cheesy to call writing a “practice”: it seemed so yoga, so crunchy granola.  Then I did yoga, and then I started to eat and enjoy crunchy granola.  Oh, and then I also started teaching, and using terms such as “practice” and “deep listening” made more sense, made connections to students, moreso at first than, say, “objective correlative” and “negative capability.”  I save those cans of critical whoop-ass for later.

Anyway, there’s an idea that to teach poetry, at least to the beginning writer, means you have to in some sense “trick” the student into thinking they are not writing poetry, that they are really practicing, doing drills, running laps, all for the show, that never quite happens or arrives. And, whammo: those same people have written poems. They didn’t see it coming.

And that’s perhaps the common ground among these two quite different projects: in one, we have poems transcribed in part from voice mails, scrawlings on note books from the subway; and in another, we have a writer-teacher outlining just what it might take to enter that mindspace in which voice mails and writing in notebooks might lead to the life poetic.  Both present poetry as a lifestyle choice. I suggest you get both and enjoy.