World Poetry Day - three favourite poems

I have Stefanie at So Many Books to thank for this.  I had no idea today was World Poetry Day, and I'm a poet!  She has a lovely post on a poet she loves, today.  I decided to write about three different poets and how I found them, and a poem from each that was one of the first by them that I loved, to celebrate World Poetry Day.

First, about poetry:
 The poet Stefanie likes,  Muriel Rukeyser, writes that people are afraid of poetry because they are afraid to feel.  I think that's true, and that's also why we instinctively reach for it in our most deepest emotional moments.  Poetry is about this moment in time, and the very best poetry takes all that goes into this moment - whatever it's about - and if it's got something true because the poet has reached deep and  touched with all he or she feels and isn't afraid to write it - then it transcends that moment, and becomes something more, something that links time and experience. It becomes timeless, always waiting for us in our moment to find it again in the poem.  This is how we relate to one another, that bridging.  Poetry is a way for us to meet one another.

Poem number one: love poem extraordinaire: 
Once upon a time, couples read poetry to each other and fell in love over the experience. Sometimes now, if we are lucky, a movie will come along and use poetry to show us that it still lives, and we are touched and off we go to find out more.  This is exactly how I found ee cummings, from a Woody Allen movie, Hannah and Her Sisters:  One of the sister's husbands reads a poem to another sister (I think, it's been decades since I saw this) he wants to be his mistress:  I hated the cad, but loved the poem:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

That last line always makes me shiver, it's so beautiful and describes how love can go into the tiniest places that we think are closed in us, but the look of our love will open.

Mostly though, poetry is a gift, that waits for the reader to stumble across it. At least, that's been my experience. A chance mention here, a friend there, an article in the paper, a quote in a movie.....so many ways to find our way to a poet.

Poem Number Two: my current poet adoration:
Last year I wrote about an interview Maria Shriver did for Oprah's magazine in 2011.  I only found the interview last year.  Here is Maria Shriver's interview with Mary Oliver.  This interview is changing my life.  For a reason I am not certain of yet, when I was young, I never asked myself, what do I want to do that would make me happy?  I think possibly I never dared to take that risk, though over time I have come to see that I will always write poetry, so now I am doing what I should have done so long ago, making room in my life to write regularly.  Mary Oliver did ask herself that question, and she knew early on writing poetry was what she was happiest doing.  She set out to make a life around writing poetry.  This is having a profound influence on me, the idea that we can do - that I can do - what makes me happy.  Here is one of the early posts on my blog, just when I was discovering Mary Oliver for the first time.  And here is another post from 2009, again on Mary Oliver, quoting some of my favourite lines.  And one more from 2010, about goldfinches (another poem I love), because apparently I've been writing every year about poetry on here, without quite realizing how much I have been!


Here is a poem from that very first collection I read and blogged about, that made me jump and recognize myself and how I am trying to live.  The poem is Yes! No! in her collection Owls and Other Fantasies:
                                                                   Yes! No!

How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.

~ Mary Oliver ~

This is how I walk, when I am out for my walks, listening to the wind, and the bird songs and calls, watching the flowers, the sky, the trees, listening and absorbing and just being in the moment.  To find a poet who writes about this way of being in the world is revelation for me.  I am learning how to be in this world, still, and how to write about being here.  That's what a poet does.

Poems don't always have to be serious:
One last poem, from a poet who I adore, and who makes me laugh.  I discovered her when I lived in England in 2000. Wendy Cope is a light verse poet - ugh I hate this category name.  It deserves more respect.  Her poetry collection Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis was referred to somewhere (I think in an article), and since I have a bit of an addiction to chocolate, the title caught my eye.  I had to find that book and see what it was about!  Well, I opened it up in the bookstore, and found myself laughing out loud!  The very first poem in the collection, Engineer's Corner, is so snarky and sarcastic, that it is worth the price of the book alone:
                 
                 Engineers’ Corner

Why isn’t there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In
Britain we’ve always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint
. . . How many schoolchildren dream of becoming great engineers?
Advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council

We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints –
That’s why so many poets end up rich,
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?

Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It’s always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day.

Yes, life is hard if you choose engineering –
You’re sure to need another job as well;
You’ll have to plan your projects in the evenings
Instead of going out. It must be hell.

While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,
You’ll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust,
With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,
With no hope, even, of a modest bust.

No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There’s far too much encouragement for poets –
That’s why this country’s going down the drain.

– Wendy Cope

Isn't that a lovely, funny poem? And so ironic.  I love it.

Do you have a favourite poem, or poet, and how did you find them?                      

Living with poetry

I like that poetry connects me to a moment in time, a shining moment that is clear and true and filled with something that takes me out of the rush of  life deeper into the moment of living.  Life is this moment, right now.  Poetry - and writing - and  meditation, is about standing still and being right now, in this moment.  Feeling this grief, this love, this beauty, the extraordinary gift of being alive, and breathing. Everything falls away except for this moment, now.  When I read a poem that moves me, that's what it does, it reaches down into me, and stills me, and I am connected to it, and made richer because I have connected to someone else through the medium of poetry.

This is the link to Naomi Shihab Nye's interview and poem Kindness.  It's found in the magazine Spirituality & Health.  I picked it up on Thursday because of an article that isn't featured online, called "The Medicine Of Poetry: How Words Can Save Your Life."  I had just come from handing in the retainer for my divorce, and I needed to draw a deep breath and settle into myself again.  This article talks about Kim Rosen's discovery of poetry at a time when she really needed it in her life. The poem" Kindness" saved her, taught her she could get through an extremely difficult time.  Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of the poem, and her story about how she came to write it is incredible also.

  I read "The Medicine of Poetry" there in the store, and started to cry, for this is how I have been feeling about discovering poetry over the past two years. Kim makes this same connection, that poetry is healing:
         
          "Those poems not only infused me with their wisdom, but they actually brought vibrancy to my body.  How, might you ask, can a poem have a physical effect? As the poet Emily Dickinson says, "If I read a  book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire could ever warm me, I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head has been taken off, I know that is poetry!"  Like a shaman's drum or a Sanskrit chant, the rhythm of a poem entrains your heartbeat, the phrasing changes your breathing, and the sounds resonate within the crystalline structures in your bones and fascia.....
      I became fascinated with poetry, not primarily as a literary art, but instead as a powerful healing medicine to unlock the richness of the inner life."
                               from "The Medicine of Poetry, How Words can Save Your Life "- Kim Rosen, in Spirituality and Health, July/Aug 2012 issue.

How often do you turn to poetry in your life?  Do you read it often, or occasionally, or almost never?  Kim Rosen was afraid of poetry for a long time  - she explains this in the article, and I really wish this article was online so you could go read the whole wonderful thing. She discovered poetry by accident one day, in a tape cassette she discovered while cleaning (she is a therapist). She listened to it, and it was spoken poetry that called out to her, and set her on her course to discover more.  The article is also on a few another person who had discovered poetry, through Mary Oliver:

     "It was a poem called 'The Summer Day' by Mary Oliver.  Much of the first stanza was about a grasshopper.  The description of the creature's 'complicated eyes' and 'pale forearms' was lovely, but Jan didn't see what it had to do with her.  A few lines later, though, she caught her breath.  "I don't know exactly what a prayer is," she heard her own voice say.  Suddenly she was awake, listening.  The next lines of the poem spoke directly to her - addressing a conversation that ran constantly below the surface of her life, but which she had never spoken out loud: How do  I pray when I am not religious?  How did my life become so meaningless?  What do I hold sacred anyway?  The final lines left her heart pounding: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?"


In the store when I read those lines, I felt a chill on my arms, and that is when I began to cry.  It is exactly how I felt when I discovered Mary Oliver, that something that I didn't know I was longing to express, leapt up and took hold of me, and ever since then I have been reading poetry and exploring what it can be about.  I have been thinking about how to bring poetry into my life more, how to open myself up to the world around me, and if I can find a way to devote myself to writing more deeply, which has been on my mind ever since reading the interview with Mary Oliver earlier this year. Here is a link to the post I wrote about that interview.  That interview is changing my life, and is changing my relationship to how I write.

 Mary Oliver's poetry is called praise poetry, a term she devised when she realized she wrote hymns to the world, love poems to nature,  poems about the sacred in nature around her.  I am deeply thrilled that there is a place in the world for poetry like this, because without knowing it, it's what I have been writing all along, trying to express, the wonder in life around me. 

One of the things that Kim suggests is to make a list of the poems that have moved you, that have the deepest meaning for you, and track when they came into your life.  She says to write out your favourite poems, verses, and lines, and put them up where you can see them - on the refrigerator, taped to the mirror, frame them,  carry them with you. She says  this is a way of bringing the poems into your life, of letting you live with them.  This is an interesting idea.  I have a little book I used to write down the poems I especially liked, so they were together, but I haven't done this in over 20 years.

 I think all art is like this, paintings, music, dance, theatre, movies, singing, all the ways we have of expressing ourselves, is our souls reaching out, saying - this moment, this life, this extraordinary time.And it's not all about beautiful moments.  Grief, loss, pain, darker emotions also have their say in our souls.  I love this poem that Kim includes  in her article, "The Guest House" by Rumi.  Here is a link online to it.  Suddenly, I am able to make room for all my mean feelings, too, for darkness and despair, and sorrow.  I don't have to like them (who does?) but they have a place, a say in who I am, too, a place at the table of my soul, and I like how Rumi says that they may be clearing me out for some new delight. 

It seems to me that poetry can be a way to connect to life spiritually.  It is a way to give voice to the sacred, to give meaning to our moments and our lives.  I am incredibly grateful, profoundly moved by the poems I am finding, especially now as I move through  this stage of separation and loss in my life. Poetry reminds me that life is sacred, and that this is a moment, and it is safe to feel it, and see it, and be in it.  This is where life is. 

So do you have a favourite poem that you return to again and again, my friends?  A poem that has sheltered you, or comforted you, or led you to an unexpected realization or view of the world, that has woken you up to possibility?  Let me know, drop me a line, I'm curious to see how many of us read poems, and what some of your favourite poems are.