Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy - Daniel Morris - Bog

"To Teach is to Learn Twice" captures the sentiment behind how and animates why Daniel Morris decided to gather the following pieces into a meaningful pattern in this volume. Morris discovered some of the poets he writes about in this book when he was in his teens and twenties: William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Allen Grossman, Peter Dale Scott, and Louise Glück. These essays, however, reflect his "learning twice" about how to engage with their poetry as a seasoned teacher and scholar working in a different cultural environment when compared to the social world of his student days. The intimate tone - especially evident in chapters that recall his student years in the Boston area in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- reflects the personal nature of his "thirty year poetry workshop" as a teacher, literary critic, and poet. This book, then, is as much bildungsroman as it is a work of criticism.