Exploring Poetry: Milk and Honey; Love Her Wild; Delights and Shadows; Mary Oliver

I've long said that I struggle with reading poetry; it's like my brain can't figure out how to look at the words on the page and make them make sense in my head. I've found recently, however, that this is less of an inherent inability than it has been a refusal to slow. down. and read more meaningfully, purposefully. And so I've made a more conscious effort to explore poetry of late. A few stand-outs, in no particular order:

Week in Reading: October 26, 2015

It's the last week of October (somehow?) and I'm basking in the relative relaxation of a slow review month. This week, I devoured Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award-winning novel from 2011; it was the kind of beautiful, cruel, heartbreaking novel that made me want to set it down and not continue but left me unable to look away. Truly, truly, truly excellent. I also finished Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last, which I liked, but not as much as some of Atwood's previous works.

Why Do We Have to Read Poetry?

"Why do we have to read poetry? ... Read it and you'll know why. And if you still don't know, read it again. And again. Some of them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them assume their humanity. People have always made poetry, she told them. Trust that it will matter to you." (from Marilynne Robinson's Home)

I started out my year with an intention to read a poem a day. I haven't succeeded in reading quite that many, but I have read more poetry this year than any other, and I'm rather enjoying it. Any recommendations for poems/poetry collections I should be sure not to miss?

A Poem a Day, Inspired by NPR

NPR has done it again: inspired me to do something I never thought I'd do. This time: read poetry. Alan Heathcock, author of Volt, wrote recently on NPR about his impulsive decision to start reading a poem a day. With breakfast. At Jiffy Lube. Wherever. They are "portable, peaceful, perfect."

While I know myself better than to expect that I will be able to sit quietly with a cup of tea and a poem every morning (I'm too likely to oversleep for that), I own several poetry anthologies and have access to the internet almost every waking minute of my life, so I am going to do my best to read 365 poems this year. I've always wanted to learn to read poetry, to learn to appreciate it, to actually open the anthologies I own. Hopefully, like Heathcock, this exercise will prove to be a "poem each morning, to sustain me through my days with the faith of an egret stepping over every dark thing." At the very least, I know I won't run out of poems.

Who's with me?

Passionately in Love with Language (Quote of the Day)

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." - W.H. Auden

Happy National Poetry Month, folks. With any luck, I'll even read some poetry this month myself (something I've always meant to do and never truly done).

A Video to Celebrate the End of National Poetry Month

I don't usually post on Saturdays, but in honor of the end of National Poetry Month, I wanted to share this video of Bill Murray reading poetry to a crowd of construction workers. Hope you all enjoyed your poetry readings for the month! I'm a bit behind in my reading for the month, so didn't actually read any poetry books in April, but that's not to say I won't find time for something in May.

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month! Since 1996, the Academy of American Poets has teamed up with publishers, booksellers, literary groups, libraries, schools, writers an poets across the country to "celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture."

To celebrate, I'm sharing with you the inscription that I found on the inside front cover of an old copy of Modern American Poetry, c. 1930 (purchased with one Emily Ramey at the Argosy Bookstore in New York, which I highly recommend to all you booklovers out there).

"Words of My Own

Poetry is what you thought about when you were a child, somehow not forgotten in the business of growing up, and discovered to be true, and valuable, and possible, just as you always thought it was...

Poetry is the language of a hoped-for country of light, overheard when the road you walk on brings you nearer the unknown border than ever before...

Poetry is that amazement you feel when you understand that light can be like a sword, the voice like a hand caressing you, thought like a flower bursting into bloom, or joy like a star falling through the sky...

Poetry is the coin, out of the full and leaden handful we throw down in payment for the hours of life, that rings true and clear, and lies glittering where it falls...

Poetry is the tree of life packed in a seed and planted in the heart and mind where it takes root, and grows green and flowers, and is the tree again...

Poetry is what sight would be to the blind, speech to the dumb, walking to the crippled and life to the condemned; but you and I see, speak, walk, live and we have poetry."

-John Holmes

Writer Spotlight - Shel Silverstein

Today is Shel Silverstein's birthday - it would have been his 79th. He is the author and poet of many of the beloved child stories and poems we know and remember fondly: Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), Light in the Attic (1981), Falling Up (1996), The Giving Tree (1964), The Missing Piece (1976)... the list goes on. To say that he work was prized is an understatement: A Light in the Attic alone won 9+ awards, and remained on the NYT bestseller list for over two years.

But Shel Silverstein was in every sense of the word a Renaissance man: singer, songwriter, poet, children's author, cartoonist. He studied music and composition briefly, and his songwriting credits include the soundtrack to A Boy Named Sue, various songs for Johnny Cash, and several hits for Loretta Lynn and the Irish Rovers.

He first started drawing cartoons for the Pacific Stars and Stripes as a GI in Japan during the Korean War. His work was later featured regularly in Playboy Magazine, and connections to a friend in children's publishing led to his first children's book, The Giving Tree. The rest, as they say, is history.

Fireflies

It's been quite a while. To ease back into this, I'm starting off with someone else's words. This is from Garrison Keillor's daily email, The Writer's Almanac, which I was turned on to first by my mom and then by my roommate. Here goes:

Fireflies

by Cecilia Woloch

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn't hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who've wronged me—for bitterness—
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toylike mice
whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

"Fireflies" by Cecilia Woloch, from Carpathia. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)