We have a wonderful lunch lectures called the Penn Sate Forum Speakers Series and today we had a fantastic reading of poems by this years Penn Sate Laureate Robin Becker. It so happens my daughter, who loves to write fiction, is being tasked with writing poetry in her English class this week. So I asked Robin for some advice. Find and read poems to your child and discuss what you hear, see, and find in them. It was a comment from a friend of hers that really struck me, however. “A novel is about time, a poem is about a moment.” I think that certainly captures much of what I enjoy about most poems (certainly not epic poetry, of course). It is the photograph to a novel’s video.

Here is a reading of one of Robin’s poems, “The New Egypt.” More of her poems can be found at Penn State’s YouTube channel.

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