AP Photo

To show the students what contemporary expository writing in heroic couplets might look like, and to polish up my old skills, I began to write a poem about American foreign policy and grand strategy. I’d forgotten how much fun this kind of thing is to do; it’s a very engaging way to write and forces a much tighter focus on meaning and word choice than prose. Over the next few weeks I’ll put up excerpts from it as I write and revise; perhaps if we had more rhyming wonks the country would be in better shape.