written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar

Earlier in the semester, our class was given the opportunity to center our individual focuses on contemporary poets of our choosing. The next several weeks were spent selecting, researching, scrutinizing, exploring, picking apart and eventually writing about said poets. This process has proven to broaden the way our class sees a poem – instead of a standalone piece that is hailed as either good or bad, it is one of many parts, each of which is just as important as the next. My personal experience with this began when I misplaced myself for a good number of hours in the campus library, slowly winding between shelves, collecting a heap of anthologies high enough to make me wonder if I’d ever leave (my incompetence in the art of choosing did not help this matter). In time I realized that the only way to make a decision before the library closed was to be as blind to the covers as I was to the poems between them. With diplomatic eyes I selected the plainest, simplest, most bare-bones hardcover as possible – and thus, my research of poet John Ciardi began.