Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy

"To Teach is to Learn Twice" captures the sentiment behind how and animates why Daniel Morris decided to gather the following pieces into a meaningful pattern in this volume. Morris discovered some of the poets he writes about in this book when he was in his teens and twenties: William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Allen Grossman, Peter Dale Scott, and Louise Glück. These essays, however, reflect his "learning twice" about how to engage with their poetry as a seasoned teacher and scholar working in a different cultural environment when compared to the social world of his student days. The intimate tone - especially evident in chapters that recall his student years in the Boston area in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- reflects the personal nature of his "thirty year poetry workshop" as a teacher, literary critic, and poet. This book, then, is as much bildungsroman as it is a work of criticism.