Moving Windows

Jack Collom (1931-2017) was a prolific poet, an adjunct professor and Outreach director of Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where, in 1989, he pioneered Eco-Lit, regarded as the first ecology literature course in the United States. His avid interest in science and nature informed much of his work, notably in books like IBC & Blue Heron, What a Strange Way of Being Dead, Arguing with Something Plato Said, Red Car Goes By, Exchanges of Earth and Sky, The Task, and Second Nature, which won the 2013 Colorado Book Award. His writings and essays about the environment were published in, among many others, ecopoetics, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Writing Nature Poetry, and ISLE, the journal of the American Society for Literature and the Environment. He was a devoted collaborator, publishing works with other poets such as Reed Bye, Elizabeth Robinson and Lyn Hejinian. In the mid-1970s he began teaching in poets-in-the-schools programs, a practice he continued for the rest of his life. Teachers and Writers Collaborative published his books about teaching: Moving Windows: Evaluating the Poetry Children Write, the influential Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community (with Sheryl Noethe), and an edited volume, A Slow Flash of Light: An Anthology of Poems about Poetry. He was a great advocate for teaching poetry beyond the conventional classroom: in prisons, senior centers, halfway houses, wildlife refuges, and other less usual contexts. He read and taught throughout the United States, and in Latin American and Europe, and received numerous grants and awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. One of his favorite children's poems was by a wise sixth-grader, who wrote: "In our wildest dreams/Our days are numbered."