The Pleasure of the Introduction
February 12, 2013 § Leave a Comment
A couple weeks ago at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, I was thrilled to introduce Brenda Shaughnessy before her reading with Craig Morgan Teicher. Here’s an excerpt:
I was first introduced to Brenda Shaughnessy’s work in a high school poetry workshop, when my teacher brought in her much beloved poem “I’m Over the Moon” for our class to discuss. As teenage students of poetry are wont to do, my classmates and I were more concerned with articulating our feelings than anything else, and I think our instructor hoped the poem—the first from her James Laughlin Award-winning second book, Human Dark with Sugar—might get us thinking more critically about the role of music and metaphor in articulating our precious feelings. To call the moment a pivotal one for me is vast understatement: my understanding of the possibility of poetry was forever broadened, and “I’m Over the Moon” remains one of my favorite poems. « Read the rest of this entry »
