Day 2: Everything Irish

March 17th is important to me because my name comes from the Irish heritage [Burke], passed on and evolved through the French nobility of the 5th Century [de Burgh].
But who's counting?

I remember being in Ireland at the Guinness Storehouse and on one of the beams was written, "Everybody's Irish on March 17th," so it must be true.

In relation to the blog, I was thinking last evening about Billy Collins' "a poem a day;" this blog will embody "a blog a day."

My inspiration: Billy Collins. I was privileged to meet him at Georgetown University for a Jack Kent Cooke Scholars event in 2004. I use "Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House" to show my students how successful description works, even in the short breadth of poetry. This semester, one of my students said, "So is that like a metaphor for people or things in life that bug you? No matter what you do, you can't shut out the noise?" Sometimes, I am simply awe-filled by my students.