This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
It’s National Teacher Appreciation Week! Do you have a favorite teacher who opened your eyes to learning? Did something click when she taught you to solve that algebraic equation? Did fireworks go off in your brain when you discussed George Orwell’s novel 1984 or when you first learned about The Emancipation Proclamation? From kindergarten through high school and beyond, many of us credit an influential teacher with our own love of learning. In today’s poem, “Lessons,” Amy Randolph shares her love of learning, life, and… well…, punctuation.
Professor Amy Randolph teaches literature and Creative Writing at Waynesburg University in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. She has two award-winning poetry collections, Cold Angel of Mercy and A Particular Sorrow, a Tree. She and her husband live in Greene County, Pennsylvania with Ella, their rambunctious black labrador.
Amy Randolph explains about today’s poem, “Lessons”: “It is one of a series of poems I wrote when a student in my creative writing course was struggling with grammar rules.”
Yet within her poem, Amy Randolph also bestows lessons in life and love. Through a simple grammar lesson, she models her life philosophy and how she believes we should treat each other.
Listen, learn, then—during this National Teacher Appreciation Week—share a poem with a teacher you admire. For ideas, check out poetryfoundation.org, Poems about Teaching and Teachers.
Or share a poem you’ve heard on Poetry Moment. I hope you can echo Emily Dickinson and exclaim, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Here’s “Lessons” by Amy Randolph.
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Never love the period, that bitterest end
to all good beginnings. Refuse those hard
seamless walls, the cold articulation
of shuttered windows.
Think of it as the final destination, a sliding
deadbolt, your last breath—
Give yourself to the comma instead, the curved
sliver of moon and everything
that fills her, or, better yet, make love
to the question mark—so sexual, so
innocent (remember how it felt to be
that innocent, so perfectly still
and blue?) like a feather that trembles on the edge
of the restless sea . . .
—
That was “Lessons” by Amy Randolph. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
