Additional Info:
Those of us who care about the young and their education must find ways to remember what teaching and learning are really about. We must find ways to keep our hearts alive as we serve our students. Poetry has the power to keep us vital and focused on what really matters in life and in schooling. Teaching with Fire is a wonderful collection of eighty-eight poems from such well-loved poets as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, and Pablo Neruda. Each of these evocative poems is accompanied by a brief story from a teacher explaining the significance of the poem in his or her life's work. This beautiful book also includes an essay that describes how poetry can be used to grow both personally and professionally.

Teaching With Fire was written in partnership with the Center for Teacher Formation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Royalties from this book will be used to fund scholarship opportunities for teachers to grow and learn. (From the Publisher)

Table Of Content:
Gratitudes
A Note to Our Readers(Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner)
Introduction (Parker J. Palmer and Tom Vander Ark)

Hearing the Call
Bob O’Meally’s “Make Music with Your Life” (John J. Sweeney)
Marge Piercy’s “To be of use” (Katya Levitan-Reiner)
Pablo Neruda’s “The Poet’s Obligation” (William Ayers)
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s “I pastori” (Susan Etheredge)
Emily Dickinson’s “The Chariot” (Judy R. Smith)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” (Marj Vandenack)
William Stafford’s “The Way It Is” (Lisa Drumheller Sudar)
Walt Whitman’s Preface to “Leaves of Grass” [Excerpt] (Lori Douglas)
Langston Hughes’s “Dream Deferred” (Heather Kirkpatrick)
Marian Wright Edelman’s “I Care and I’m Willing to Serve” (Linda Lantieri)

Cherishing the Work
Billy Collins’s “First Reader” (Sandra Dean)
Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles” (Curtis Borg)
David Whyte’s “Working Together” (Jani Barker)
Marcie Hans’s “Fueled” (Betsy Motten)
William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” (Sarah Fay)
George Venn’s “Poem Against the First Grade” (Theresa Gill)
Jeff Moss’s “On the Other Side of the Door” (Lamson T. Lam)
Lydia Cortés’s “I Remember” (Sonia Nieto)
Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (Troyvoi Hicks)
Gary Blankenburg’s “The Mouse” (Ellen Shull)
Lewis Buzbee’s “Sunday, Tarzan in His Hammock” (Dan Mindich)

On the Edge
John Milton’s “Paradise Lost, Book VIII” (John I. Goodlad)
Stephen Sondheim’s “Children Will Listen” (Don Shalvey)
Al Zolynas’s “Love in the Classroom” (Ron Petrich)
Billy Collins’s “On Turning Ten” (Chip Wood)
Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift” (Kelly Gallagher)
Mary Oliver’s “The Journey” (by Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy)
Yehuda Amichai’s “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children” (Shifra Schonmann)
Jellaludin Rumi’s “The Lame Goat” (Michael Poutiatine)
Linda McCarriston’s “Hotel Nights with My Mother” (Wanda S. Praisner)
Lucile Burt’s “Melissa Quits School” (Leslie Rennie-Hill)

Holding On
Denise Levertov’s “Witness” (Robert Kunzman)
Octavio Paz’s “After” (Catherine Johnson)
Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” (Elizabeth V. V. Bedell)
William Butler Yeats’s “Everything That Man Esteems” (Betsy Wice)
May Sarton’s “Now I Become Myself” (Amy Eva-Wood)
Annie Dillard’s “Teaching a Stone to Talk” [Excerpt] (Libby Roberts)
David Whyte’s “Sweet Darkness” submitted( Jeanine O’Connell)
Rubin Alves’s “Tomorrow’s Child” (Sarah Smith)
Donald Hall’s “Names of Horses” (Laurel Leahy)
Judy Brown’s “Fire” (Maggie Anderson)
Margaret Walker’s “For My People” (Tracy Swinton Bailey)

In the Moment
Elizabeth Carlson’s “Imperfection” (Glynis Wilson Boultbee)
David Wagoner’s “Lost” (Fred Taylor)
Wendell Berry’s “A Purification” (Rick Jackson)
Marge Piercy’s “The seven of pentacles” (Sally Z. Hare)
Pablo Neruda’s “Keeping Quiet” (Catherine Gerber)
Gary Snyder’s “What Have I Learned” (Perie Longo)
Wislawa Szymborska’s “There But for the Grace” (Lesley Woodward)
Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love” (David Hagstrom)
William Stafford’s “You Reading This, Be Ready” (Lucile Burt)
Edgar A. Guest’s “Don’t Quit” (Reg Weaver)

Making Contact.
Charles Olson’s “These Days” (John Fox)
Donna Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem” (Debbie S. Dewitt)
Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy” [Excerpt] (Jim Burke)
Virginia Satir’s “Making Contact” (Dennis Littky)
John Moffitt’s “To Look at Any Thing” (Angela Peery)
Jellaludin Rumi’s “Two Kinds of Intelligence” (Marianne Houston)
Adrienne Rich’s “Dialogue” (Adam D. Bunting)
Galway Kinnell’s “Saint Francis and the Sow” (Libby Falk Jones)
Maxine Kumin’s “Junior Life Saving” (Thomasina LaGuardia)
Gary Soto’s “Saturday at the Canal” (Steve Elia)
Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” (Penny Gill)

The Fire of Teaching.
Wislawa Szymborska’s “A Contribution to Satistics” (Elizabeth Meador)
E.E. Cummings’s “You Shall Above All Things” (Mark Nepo)
Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” (Caren Bassett Dybek)
Ranier Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (Rob Reich)
Robert Graves’s “Warning to Children” (Ali Stewart)
Wallace Stevens’s “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain” (Samuel Scheer)
Langston Hughes’s “My People” (Mary Cowhey)
nikki giovanni’s “the drum” (Sam Grabelle)
nila northSun’s “moving camp too far” (Tom Weiner)
Czeslaw Milosz’s “Gift” (Suzanne Strauss)
T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker” (Stephen Gordon)
Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Shoulders” (Marcy Jackson)
Bettye T. Spinner’s “Harvest Home” (Linda Powell Pruitt)

Daring to Lead
Rabindranath Tagore’s “Where the Mind Is Without Fear” (Tony Wagner)
Barbara Kingsolver’s “Beating Time” (Susan Klonsky)
Thomas Jefferson’s “Passage from a Letter to William Charles Jarvis” (Theodore R. Sizer)
Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder” (Edward Alan Katz)
Rainer Maria Rilke’s “I Believe in All That Has Never Yet Been Spoken” (Tom Vander Ark)
Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son” (Joe Nathan)
nikki giovanni’s “ego-tripping” (Janice E. Jackson)
Anne Sexton’s “Courage” (Wendy Kohler)
William Stafford’s “Silver Star” (Jay Casbon)
Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” [Excerpt] (Sandra Feldman)
Vaclav Havel’s “It Is I Who Must Begin” (Diana Chapman Walsh)
Marge Piercy’s “The low road” (Parker J. Palmer)
Tending the Fire: The Utility of Poetry in a Teacher’s Life (Sam M. Intrator)
About the Courage to Teach Program

The Contributors
The Editors