Verse Assignments

About the Book

A gathering of poems written over Landis’s teaching life, Verse Assignments reflects themes that include classroom quotidian routine, daily family, community, and faith experience, as well as response to requests about celebratory occasions and the achievements of colleagues. Landis finds much to respect in the deeds of love that surround us and how the meaning of life can be enhanced when it is expressed in the sound and rhythm of verse.

            From his study and teaching of poetry, Landis is often engaged by poetic forms and enjoys the discipline of stricter rhymes and meters in older forms. While Verse Assignments contains examples of these, Landis enjoys as well the freedom from restraint and the colloquial vocabulary and informal manner of ordinary speech.

            Landis comes to poetry writing with the pleasant experiences given him by the teachers of his lifetime. Memorizing poems began at an early age, and he has continued to enjoy the richness of poetic language from Chaucer and Milton and Shakespeare’s inimitable poems and plays to selections from present times. 

About the Author

Growing up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Jay B. Landis liked school and favored the teachers who assigned writing and directed poetry clubs. His own English teaching career spanned fifty years. He is an alumnus of Eastern Mennonite College and holds a master’s degree from Case Western Reserve University and a doctor’s degree from Idaho State University. Retired in Harrisonburg, Virginia, he and his wife Peggy have two daughters and three grandchildren. For relaxation he shares the roses from his garden.

A gathering of poems written over Landis’s teaching life, Verse Assignments reflects themes that include classroom quotidian routine, daily family, community, and faith experience, as well as response to requests about celebratory occasions and the achievements of colleagues. Landis finds much to respect in the deeds of love that surround us and how the meaning of life can be enhanced when it is expressed in the sound and rhythm of verse.