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My Teaching Philosophy In Celtic mythology there is a story of an innkeeper who promises his guests a wonderful night’s sleep if they will stay at his inn, and enjoy his magical bed. When his guests complain that his beds are too short or too long, he assures them that they will grow accustomed to these new accommodations, and he sends them back off to bed. As soon as his guests fall off to sleep, he sneaks into their rooms and—with the fantastic swiftness of many myths—he cuts off their legs or stretches them. “What better way to provide for the perfect fit for his guests?’ he thinks. When we teach the Humanities, we start with the “guest”—the student. As much as we want to show our students the “magic” and liberation, and the growth and self-discovery that the humanities can offer them, we must always remember that what they need from us is not the story of that joy—but the tools for finding it themselves . Rather than promise a good night's sleep—or a life of convictions and fulfillment—we are obligated to model it. We model for our students the passion, the responsibility, and the deliberateness with which we come to our own studies, and we make them colleagues in that journey. In making them colleagues, we learn about their particular interests and goals—and in turn, we become allies in showing them the degree to which their particular goals are part of a complex of other disciplines, other intellectual questions. In other words, we help them to see connections—connections, not just between intellectual questions and disciplines, but also between human beings and each human being’s individual journey. - M. B. McLatchey Copyright © 2009 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved.

Index Previous Next Synonym for Marriage Pledge – bond, allegiance, alliance, a yearning for a god; mercy, agape, grace; a chance against the odds; a dervish dance; benevolence. In a sentence: The first love was cherubic eros, a child with a flaming torch; gold and leaden arrows, one to arouse – the other for unfathomable sorrow. Deception – duplicitous, the let-down, the Judas Kiss; a double-crossing, ill offering; the trick among tricks that colors history. In a sentence: There was little doubt in ancient days that Medea, slayer of offspring, chariot-maid, was by a spouse – by the stars, by the forces of a spinning earth – betrayed. Forgiveness – pity, mercy, leniency. In a sentence: The earliest Greek dream for repentance is a stable to clean, its benches built for milking cows, not a sinner’s crawl; a purging of the stench of an unkept stall; a never forgotten love, Penelope’s woven – and unwoven – shawl. Faith – hope, truth, fealty, constancy; renewed belief. In a sentence: The ancients were sure the ring finger pointed to the heart. Hence, this never-ending band – once made of leather, bone, ivory – has no region, no mythic stop or start, no legend small enough to capture the difference in a master’s and a servant’s call. . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Banyan Review , Fall 2023.

Index Previous Next 2014 Robert Frost Award - Finalist Sugaring Sestina for an ill boy A loyal maple lingers by your bed: nature fiercely altered. Its sugar finds your pulse, then trickles in with a rhythm partly boy, partly tree. For comity we call it Mr. Pipes: a way of making peace with hard adjustments. It takes long freezing nights and thawing days to make the sap come like this -- a big run. Drip after drip, each steadier than the last, run through clear lines. I see, now, nothing’s altered that hadn’t already gone awry. Your limbs, thawing in the afternoon sun. The only rhythm -- rations of sap met evenly, at last, with insulin. The hard trek back from a seizure’s arctic grip: whistling pipes, banks of white cotton; a nurse (too cheerful) pipes up: how brave you are, and you’ll be up and run- ning in no time. A promise? Or a wish for her hard- luck kids? One spring, we got behind; buckets overflowed, altered the ground below to a sticky mat that sounded the rhythm of hard luck in thick, slow plops. The whole world thawing like centuries of ice cracking beneath us, thawing the gummy linings of blackened buckets and pipes – dripping with a precision suggestive of a subterranean rhythm. I read, that spring, that scientists can tell if the sap has run up from the roots or down the bark – but, not why its taste is altered year to year. Always the questions we care about that are hard. And “coming to” always the same: that hard expression sweeps over you. Your eyes, half-frozen pools still thawing: late winter, but late in feeling the seasons altered. Your way of banning ceremony, or welcome-horns, or pipes. Your way of taking back the small reserves that run from you each time you lose this fight. Your fitful rhythm yielding to this old-world, pacing rhythm. And knowing where to greet you, here or there, always so hard to gauge. Which is the place of the senses? Where we out-run our fears? You take us there, each thawing day, it seems. Limbs or pipes? We give up these distinctions. Nothing is altered that wasn’t already granted. Nothing is altered that makes us see things hard to see. Some call it god, others just tendrils thawing. . Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Naugatuck River Review , Winter/Spring/ 2016. Reprinted with permission from Robert Frost Foundation . Semi-Finalist, Naugatuck River Review's 7th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest

Index Previous Next Anthem No one makes love in European cities. Instead of sex, a café con leite in a leaning café, bread and olives like offerings or props between strangers. Between rooftops blank bed sheets wave, flags without countries, on cable lines. Hope for a better life ceased with the people’s resistance. In courtyards, dull statues of poets, cats in heat mime some godless coupling. What made us come here? Films like La Mime, or Il Postino where love is a mailman’s song to a wide-hipped woman and sex is a long suggestion in close-ups of mouths. Courses in college, where olive trees figured fertility and lovers in rivers or on moon-soaked rooftops promised a holy union. How we tracked in tripping rhythms and limping lines, those foreign places, foreign minds. And, your score-catching resistance to seeing a pulse in the poems that I swore was mine – a resistance that divided us then, but steadies us now, where marriage is an ancient, sacred mime: Montana’s native dance, a bushman’s song. In the hotel room next to ours, sex solves a couple’s dispute: breaths in small calls and answers like olive branches; breaths in syllabics that drift over bedsheets and rooftops like rhapsodies the ancients masked and mimed; sighs that recall the faint line between hunger and dying. Their post-coital quiet, like a lingering thought or line, makes us pause. In the quiet, a sheer curtain takes air, a quiet resistance to differences in hotel rooms, in heartaches, in countries, in love’s metered mime. For a few moments, we bathe in it. We are fluent in all languages, fluent in sex. From our window, a row of houses, an etch-a-sketch of intersecting lives, olive- toned children run home. A new moon casts drying bed sheets, quiet rooftops in a truer beige-bone. Below, an elderly pair flirts in open vowels and faint, staccato lines – Whitman’s free verse, Petrarch’s cypress vine. The body’s sung hunger; the soul’s mournful mime. We are almost home, love. For now, this is where god is: desire’s ancient theater, promises, olives. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2005 Annie Finch Prize On Recognizing Saints As if to find new icons for her life or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine she scans our purchases too consciously. Flips through a magazine I'm embarrassed to be buying. Studies its regimen for shapely thighs, asks me - because she's heard - if drinking wine is good for nursing. The shift from idle chitchat to appeal. Camille, her nametag says. Camille of olive skin and violet nails with long metallic tips, who flashes her lover's sucking marks like her stigmata. Camille who isn't showing yet - but like Crivelli's virgin martyr Catherine, peers sidelong at me and leans decoratively against her register as Catherine did against her studded wheel. So clearly Catherine that I want to look away - or kneel. And yet, Crivelli would have framed her differently: a martyr tucked away with other martyrs in a predella of muted colors, quiet suffering. None of this heart-to-heart - this girlfriend talk that brings to mind a string of small petitions and makes me say my part. . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the Annie Finch Prize, 2005. Judge: Margot Schlipp Published in The National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2005.