10 Replies on “Why I love Vermont”

  1. I’m so glad you posted that. I was afraid the kids might not even get a sentence. The poetic justice made me smile too.

  4. Although I have to say…to take a class with Jay Parini, I might be willing to commit a little vandalism myself. He’s amazing.

  6. You’d love the Frost homestead site, too. They have a nature path with quotes from his poems placed on panels at appropriate spots. So cool.

  7. It is a very unique approach but poetic justice? Ummm…I’m not sure. I’d like to think that it will make a difference but…I don’t like to see them go scott free with just a poetry class and community service as punishment.

    Personally, I don’t think it will make a difference to kids who would trash a place like that in the first place …and they ALL can’t blame it on a drunken party. And just because you are 3 sheets to the wind does not mean you trash a place. We never did, and I’ve been to some ‘good old boy’ rip snorters!

    What worries me about this is that they will think that they have beaten the system and by taking a few classes in poetry and doing some community service work their slate is wiped clean … no record. What kind of a message does that send to others out there?

  8. Correct me if I am wrong but I think Parini was an English professor when I was I an English major at NYU. Hmm.. I think I am right. (But he was not one of my teachers.)

    -Pamela.. thinking what mischief we can get into to get into the class….

  9. Here’s a Gift for You {}

    Isn’t that a Frost poem– THE GIFT OUTRIGHT–?

    The land was ours before we were the land’s.
    She was our land more than a hundred years
    Before we were her people. She was ours
    In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
    But we were England’s, still colonials,
    Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
    Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
    Something we were withholding made us weak
    Until we found out that it was ourselves
    We were withholding from our land of living,
    And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
    Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
    (The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
    To the land vaguely realizing westward,
    But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
    Such as she was, such as she would become.