A Place of Encounter: On Poetry, Teaching, and Faith

What if reading poetry could change you—not just what you think, but how you move through the world?

For forty years, Thomas Gardner led students through this transformative act—not analyzing poems from a distance but reperforming them from the inside. Walking together through Elizabeth Bishop's broken beaches, Robert Frost's snowy woods, and Emily Dickinson's rooms of possibility, they discovered that getting lost is how we are found. That acknowledging fragility opens eyes to wonder. That ...