I'm very excited that my new course, "Sacred and Secular Poetry," has been accepted by the General Education committee under the rubric "Culture and Belief." The course traces the...

Who could have known that the Rilke conference would be so inspiring? The workshops, in which we dicussed individual poems and their contexts were splendid. The only problem was that there were always three workshops running parallel, so we had to make a choice. But once I was in the workshop I had selected, everything else paled in comparison with the intelligent and thoughtful discussion. I think we all learned a huge amount from these workshops. We also profited from the keynote speeches. My own favorite was Anthony Phelan's lecture on drafts of poems, a very sophisticated and subtle...