Penny J. Johnson's Blog, page 7

Poem of the Week: Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”

As I considered which Mary Oliver poem to focus on this week, I discovered that her most famous poem is “The Summer Day.” I was surprised. Despite its cherry-picked commodification, the poem is responsible for pulling so many new readers into verse’s thralls, a difficult thing to do in an […]

Poet of the Week: Mary Oliver

I encountered Mary Oliver through her poetry during my last semester of college. Up until that point, my college career had focused on professional writing per my degree requirements. I chose to take what I considered to be a bonus course to finish out my creative writing minor. In this […]

Practicing Poetic Themes: Birds and Bees and Butterflies

Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems focus on nature. Nature is a recurring theme for many poets. Here is one of mine–a haiku–that may be short in length, but has a sweeter story between the lines.

Poetic Forms: Emily Dickinson

“. . . at her best . . . she writes . . . close to the bone, concentrating the very essence of what she saw and felt in phrases that strike and penetrate like bullets, and with an originality of thought unsurpassed in American poetry.” from Selected Poems and […]

Homebound

Poem of the Week: Emily Dickinson’s “This is my letter to the world”

“. . . she lived a life, outwardly uneventful, inwardly dedicated to a ‘letter to the world’ that would express, in poems of absolute truth and of utmost economy, her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of what Henry James called ‘the landscape of the soul.'” […]

Poet of the Week: Emily Dickinson

As I considered the poet I had chosen for this week, I felt trepidation. I know that in part it is because Emily Dickinson has been a cursory poet for me. I have read her work. I have taught her work. But, there are unknowns about Emily Dickinson–that unlike Robert […]

Practicing Poetic Themes: Roads and Woods and Walls

Robert Frost’s poetry inspired me when I was a teenager and continues to do so in my current age. His work has inspired my own from my first poem “Homeward Bound” to “Streets” to “Unleashed.” I hope you have enjoyed learning more about Robert Frost and how his poetry might […]

Poetic Form: Robert Frost

Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.  www.poetryfoundation.org In studying Robert Frost’s more in-depth, I learned more about the forms he used for some of his poems. I have included some of his best-known ones […]

Quotation of the Week