Donald Beagle is a 66 year old poet, and for the past 20 years, a professor and Library Director at Belmont Abbey College near Charlotte NC. “Poetry, to me,” comments Donald, “remains the most challenging of literary endeavors, because of its immediacy in the present moment, paired with its sense of timelessness. I grew up in a place so rural that my formal education began in one of the last one-room schools in Michigan, with 35 students, grades one through six. It ended with my graduate degree at the University of Michigan, then with 35,000 students. Between those extremes were studies at the California Institute of the Arts, followed by my BA at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. I learned from wonderful mentors and teachers; such as a course with linguists Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Samuel Jay Keyser, where I learned metrical theory based on their book, The Sound Pattern of English. And I’ve been fortunate to win some awards along the way, including the Major Hopwood Award for Graduate Poetry at the University of Michigan, and 40 years later, the Gail O’Day Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from Wake Forest University. 

These strange days of global pandemic brought to mind two poems I’d like to share from my newest book, and 3rd poetry collection: Driving into the Dreamtime: New & Selected Poems. In both poems, [titled “On Whitefish Bay,” and “On Viewing Comet Halley with my Young Daughter,”] the persona contemplates humanity’s place in a vast cosmos, within a natural world at once frightening, beautiful, and inspiring

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Created during a time of quarantine in the global Coronavirus pandemic, A Moment Of Your Time’s mission is to provide a space for expression, collaboration, community and solidarity. In this time of isolation, we may have to be apart but let’s create together. 

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Concept by Jenny Curtis

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