A Place of Encounter (On Poetry, Teaching, and Faith)

What if reading poetry could change you—not just what you think, but how you move through the world?

For forty years, Thomas Gardner led students through this transformative act—not analyzing poems from a distance but reperforming them from the inside. Walking together through Elizabeth Bishop’s broken beaches, Robert Frost’s snowy woods, and Emily Dickinson’s rooms of possibility, they discovered that getting lost is how we are found. That acknowledging fragility opens eyes to wonder. That poems, like parables, ask us not to produce definitive explanations but to keep up.

A Place of Encounter is Gardner’s luminous record of this work. Through fifty-one short lyric essays moving between memory, close reading, and theological reflection, he opens up the inner drama of poems as spiritual exercises—spaces where, as Dickinson puts it, our narrow hands are forced wide to gather paradise. With the grace and precision of the poems he loves, Gardner shows how deep reading grooves interior change.

Here is the classroom as temple: bodies leaning forward, voices rising together, readers discovering they’re no longer alone. Here is teaching from a position of faith that speaks across every spiritual commitment. Here is poetry as a place of encounter.