“Sea of Faith,” by John Brehm & “Lawrence,” by Tony Hoagland

This one tried to explain in such a way as to protect her from humiliation.

I was a new teacher when I pasted that little book full of poems-I-wished-I’d-written.  And apparently I was drawn to ones about teachers discovering they had things to learn from their students and teachers with regrets about things they’d declared or hadn’t. Jeffrey Harrison’s “The Fork” is in there, to0.

And so is this one, which failed, when someone at a party spoke of him with a dismissive scorn, to stand up for D.H. Lawrence.

“Sea of Faith” is the title poem in John Brehm’s book, Sea of Faith (U of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Here’s the text of the poem, on Brehm’s website. And “Lawrence” is in Tony Hoagland’s book, Donkey Gospel (Graywolf, 1998). Read it here, if you like, or watch Hoagland himself read it here.