David A. Sohn (1929–2010)

This book does what no other writing course has been able to do. It provides the student with as close to actual experience in the field as you could ever hope to get from reading a book, because it teaches you how to pay attention to the world around you in order to improve your perception and memory and explore different ways of expressing your personal experiences on paper.
Designed primarily as a school book aimed at children in full time education, I found it valuable as a self study aid for anyone interested in improving their creative writing.
I have only just begun using this method, but already I can see many practical applications. The techniques this book teaches are likely to have far reaching effects not only in the field of composition but in helping anyone who is wishing to,improve their thought processes through increased observation and memory retention.
In that respect I found Tony Buzan's book Use Your Head to be an excellent companion book as it teaches you other ways of improving long and short term memory and I feel that memory is the key to recall, and if you are able to quickly and accurately recall more details then your mind is free to think more creatively about how that information can be displayed on paper in a more poetic way perhaps.… (altro)

Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes, which is still the record for one poet. Frost was the first poet to read for a Presidential Inauguration, and since Kennedy, this tradition of calling upon a poet to call upon The People is still continued. [18] The authors are teachers who put together this multi-media study guide. It sets up the showing of the film, "A Lover's Quarrel with the World", and includes questions to stimulate discussion and writing.

I am one of those who the authors suggest are surprised by the "dimensions and depth" of Robert Frost. I was fooled by his apparent simplicity, which was an image he consciously created in both his poems and his public appearances. He viewed poetry as performance. As is life.

The secret of Frost which the authors reveal is the one he admitted: "I began my first poem with a cause. Sometimes I come too near the surface with the cause--uisually I keep it buried. Still in my books, but veiled, but still there." [ix]

While considered essentially a "Nature Poet", Frost has only two poems without people in them. And consider this: When asked if Nature is cruel, Frost said "I know it isn't kind. Matthew Arnold said 'Nature is cruel. It's man that's sick of blood.' And man doesn't seem very sick of it. Nature is always more or less cruel." [x]

I. Frost: The Man - "Robert Lee Frost" -- the authors inexplicably fail to note that he was named by his father after Robert E. Lee to honor the Confederacy, but they carefully document the Unitarian influence of his mother who converted from Presbyterian, and his raising, in tears on his first day in school, and his initiation into a street gang, in San Francisco. The authors present brilliant bits - the scenes and anecdotes from witnesses - of Frost in the classroom, as student and later, teacher. Privations, marriage to the brilliant Elinor, England, and the suicide of his son.

II. Frost: The Poet - quoting, "My poems--I should suppose everybody's poems--are set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless...forward, AND in the dark." [22] Here we find the ideas about life, what it is, and who we are. Drawn from Nature, the treasures of courage, the reward of working, of making poems.

III. Film Guide: "A Lover's Quarrel with the World" - preview and afterview.
Noting that Frost referred to writing "one of my best poems standing on my head". Referencing "On the Heart's beginning to Cloud the Mind" [63, ref Collected at 377].

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

Frost emphasized, repeated, five statements:
a) "Me for the woods"
b) "every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world"
c) "you've got to be brave"
d) "retreat", and
e) "may my gift, my sacrifice, be acceptable in Thy sight"

This is like the Unitarian creed.… (altro)

From vintage scholastic cover:

Teen-agers ask...Who am I? What makes me laugh, cry, dream? What's cruel, what's kind...what's courage?

Teen-agers look...at teh world around them--at themselves, their friends, their families. Teen-agers look at today, and wonder about tomorrow.

Teen-agers write...with humor, honesty, imagination. And each year thousands of them submit their best work to the annual Scholastic Magazine Writing Awards.

Peppermint presents the "best of the best" from teen-age winners of Scholastic Writing Awards, junior Division: original poems, stories, and articles by students in junior high school. ---- I thought maybe I'd find some junior high authors who have become well-known as adults, but I didn't recognize anyone. That's not to say that other people wouldn't recognize some authors. My interest is children's and YA lit, mainly. As I glanced through these entries, I was impressed by the quality and maturity. Having worked with junior high-aged children and dealing now with one of my own, I have to say I've never seen any work on this level. I had thought I was reading high school work, and even at that level these award winners often seem more like the best of what I was seeing in the college writing center where I used to work. I hope that such excellence isn't a thing of the past, and that there'd still be "thousands" of kids in grades 7-9 (those are the grades elibible for the junior division) now who could compete at the level of the work included in this book.… (altro)