Intructor Comments - Otherwise

"Kenyon, of course, is a wonderful read for anyone, but she is especially useful for poetry writing students. Her power comes from the meticulous rendering of the life worth living, which is not only a life like most lives, but also, in poem after poem, a life transformed, made brilliantly real, by a superior practitioner of free verse. Young writers can profit immensely from such a thorough example of this gift." -- Paul M. Hedeen, Wartburg College, Waverly, IA

"Otherwise by Jane Kenyon will be the key example of a body of work by a singular poet in my Introduction to Poetry course this fall."
-- Marsha Nourse, Dean College, Westboro, MA

"It probably goes without saying that Kenyon was a good poet to have such a group read; the straightforwardness, accessibility, and the emotive directness of the poems was instructive for the students: even supposedly advanced undergraduate poets tend to commit the expected sorts of lapses that plague beginning writers -- grandiosity, militant and cumbersome abstraction, that sort of thing. Kenyon avoids all of this, and I'm sure that many of the students in the class will continue to read her." -- David Wojahn, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN