© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I admire a poem by Bernadette Mayer called “Tomorrow.” It’s from a book of hers called Scarlet Tanager. The poem is a good prompt to get my ESL students writing about the future and the conditional. In the poem … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Beautiful thoughts aren’t always pretty and neither are beautiful words. At the poetry workshop I did at Wuhan University in China, I’d show two short poems by Alice Notley that were simple to understand. Here is one of them. … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… This trip to Wuhan I managed to eat some very good meals when in the company of my colleague, the indefatigable searcher for the real thing, Luke Amoroso. Luke knows where all the good food is. We had some … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I worked with some great teachers this summer at Wuhan University. We taught American Cultural Studies, getting to Wuhan on Saturday, July 10, setting up our homerooms Sunday, and starting to teach two classes a day on Monday. Talk … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… July 8th was the first day I was in Beijing with all my teachers colleagues getting to know everybody. They would turn out to be a great faculty, good intelligent spirits, experienced travelers with no drama. Tiananmen Square and … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… A class of mine did great speeches. The speech I liked the best was given by a young man named Yu who is so nervous that when he speaks his right hand is clenched in a fist and his … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Liu is an English major who helped us American faculty out at the hotel on the campus at Wuhan University by making life easier with quick thoughtful attention. And he was kind enough to do a translation of the … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… “Today and tomorrow is all we have. Yesterday, no matter what some will say is gone,” I write, but as soon as I do the wall I’m leaning on says, “I will still be here when you’ve gone. Yesterdays … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Some of my homeroom students also attended my poetry workshop. As I’ve mentioned before they aren’t English majors or poets. They are scientists and mathematicians. Li Feng works with electric information, Lily is a chemist, Celeste and Kelvin are … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Homerooms are like your children. You always love the ones you get. This year at Wuhan University was no different. My students have a wide range of majors: mathematics, electrical, hydrogen, and power engineering, biology, chemistry, surveying and mapping, … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… This short poem was written summer of 2010 by Muhammad, a Muslim student of mine from western China. He is the first student at Wuhan I’ve ever had who wasn’t Hun Chinese. There are more foreign students on campus, … Continue reading
© 2010 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
When I first met Rich, the summer of 2008, I thought she was very shy, but I also knew she was confident enough to give me a poem she had written for a class assignment. Like most of my … Continue reading