Tag Archives: Donald Hall
On Year 5: November’s Poems
November: one of my favorite months. It just seems a release after all the colorful expectations of October. Time to settle down, get the wood in, freeze all the food to last through the winter. The leaves are gone. The birds are gone. The light, once Daylight Savings Time is over, is gone. Hibernation is the …
On Year 4: May’s Poems
The homestretch, the final month of the school year. It’s been wet and squelchy, unsettled, cold. The kids have been antsy and bad-tempered. I’ve tried to give them poems that provided something warm and uplifting. I’m not sure I was always successful–and quite frankly, this has been a year where the students have been really …
On Year 4: November’s Poems
November is a blustery month, a month of bruisy skies and moaning winds. A thousand years ago, when I was in sixth grade, in a classroom whose high windows looked over the gym roof at the empty gray skies, I remember the social studies teacher, Mr. York, saying how much he hated November, because it …
On Year 3: November’s Poems
November is the month of birthdays of so many of my favorite people, including my two daughters, my poetic mother Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and the man who oversaw my creative thesis in grad school, Ted Deppe. It’s also, I think, the most evocative month of the entire year: so brooding, like a Brontë novel. This month …