As a young man fresh out of 12 years of parochial school, Jim Moreno went where the wind blew him. At 19, Navy boot camp, Navy Memphis, Vietnam, and civilian life again. At 22 years of age Junior College on the G.I. Bill. English 101 and professor Gary Minor took him into the world of poetry: Reading Professor Minor’s poetry assignment one night I read Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I was charmed, no, mesmerized by the beauty of the poem. I then memorized the poem. Professor Minor loved the poetry classics. But the poetry he had us read was contemporary, like the poetry in this class for April’s National Poetry Month. What do present & past United States Poet Laureates have to offer us in terms of inspiration, motivation, imagination, and contagion (in the sense that we read or hear a poem and we are invited to enter the magic)? Poet Laureate Rita Dove (1993-1995) wrote: poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful…For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard not an aria heard…I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, the crystallized details we all hinge our lives on..nothing is too small. Nothing is too…ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they’re the things that sustain us. And they’re the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry. Poet Laureate Billy Collins (2000-2003) wrote: I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious…part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is its always your turn—I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense of flow. This three-hour class for beginning or seasoned poets will be divided into two ninety-minute segments. The first segment includes poetry prompts and film clips from some of America’s Poet Laureates from 1993 to 2008. The second segment will include some Poet Laureates from 2009 to 2022. The poets chosen from these two time periods will include the above poets and poets who have inspired Jim Moreno in the hopes that class participants will also be inspired to write original poems in a Container of respect and dignity no matter the culture or color of skin of the poet.
