"For the Bird Singing before Dawn"

4 May 2022:  Lovely and moving poem. Feel like I am constantly swinging between this energy and its complete opposite, but so grateful for when I can embrace it and for the folks who make me believe it.

"Some people presume to be hopeful

when there is no evidence for hope,

to be happy when there is no cause.

Let me say now, I’m with them."

"Give Me This"

16 September 2020: This was in my inbox first thing this morning. It made me tear up and stayed with me all day. What a gift. 

"Give Me This"

Ada Limón

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back

to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low

in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house

but what came was much stranger, a liquidity

moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog

slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still

green in the morning’s shade. I watched her

munch and stand on her haunches taking such

pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed

delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts

on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,

as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled

spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,

I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes

me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine

when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,

and she is doing what she can to survive.

 

"Little Prayer"

 26 August 2020: Feeling the Samson allusions here, but also just yearning for peace, healing, and space to breathe.

"little prayer"
Danez Smith

let ruin end here

let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter

let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs

let this be the healing
& if not   let it be

Project 19

 18 August 2020: After a long day working on my Emily Dickinson syllabus, I just spent some time looking at the Project 19 website, which collects poems from contemporary poets celebrating the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Not a bad way to wrap up the "thinking" part of my day, though my brain is fried just enough tonight that I'm going to need to revisit the site a bunch.

"Diabolic"

15 July 2020:

"How they say they love her
And how they look at her
Is what Phillis observes;
Like she’s the hole in the pocket
After the money rolls out." --Cornelius Eady, "Diabolic"

The poem Eady is writing about here--Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America"--is one of my favorite to teach. Eady's work is a terrific contemplation of what Wheatley must have thought in her very complicated and circumscribed world, where she was repeatedly fed conflicting ideologies and still managed to create powerful, lasting, and fundamentally American art. (Love that Eady calls "On Being Brought" "one of the most American poems I think we have.")

"ars pasifika"

22 May 2020:

"ars pasifika"
Craig Santos Perez

when the tide


of silence


rises


say “ocean”


then with the paddle


of your tongue


rearrange


the letters to form


“canoe”

"The Way We Love Something Small"

13 April 2020: What a strange day today has been. Felt out of rhythm and step all day. Felt stressed and anxious more than not. Trying to relax this evening. This poem helps. In the little explanation that accompanied it in the poem-a-day email, Kimberly Blaeser explains it:

“This poem comes from a series of similar pieces all called ‘The Way We Love Something Small,’ pieces grounded in an understanding of poetry as an act of attention. Each poem focuses on those heightened moments common to our experience in which a place, sound, personal exchange, natural creatures, even an object suddenly resonates or becomes transformative. While rescuing a newborn mouse, I saw for the first time the pup’s delicate, nearly invisible claws, and writing of that moment illuminated it. Because the poems arise from ‘small’ epiphanies, I use an airy, slight form. I see the pieces in this series as aspiring to an impact similar to haiku: simultaneously grounded in image and allusive, they invite a re-seeing of what is before us.”

Looking around me in this space, a space I am blessed to have, I see all around me small things I love: a glimpse though the window of the redbud tree in full bloom out back; just a piece of BabyCat's white foot as she stretches out nearby (always nearby), but not fully in sight; the streetlight's beam outside, casting a pinkish gold on the blacktop.

So yes...surprise: poetry helps.

"The Pedestrian"

19 February 2020: I keep telling my students this semester that I wish every one of them was in every one of my classes because the material keeps intersecting in such unusual and unexpected ways. In American Ethnic literature, we've been wrestling with questions about identity, racism, and double-consciousness. In Young Adult Literature, we've wrapped up our discussion of Monster and are about half-way through The Hate U Give. In my seminar on gender and humor, we've finished Phoebe Robinson's book and spent our last class discussing 2 Dope Queens. 

So today's poem-of-the-day just really hit me. I love its use of the sonnet form, its title's double-meaning (as a noun and an adjective--as in, this is just an ordinary occurrence), and its quiet devastation. Give it a read.

"The Artist Signs Her Masterpiece, Immodestly"

8 January 2020:

This is very good: "The Artist Signs Her Masterpiece, Immodestly," by Danielle DeTiberus.

"...Between this violence and the sleeping
enemies outside, my name rises. Some darknesses
refuse to fade. Ergo Artemitia. I made this—I."

Love this bit of commentary from the poet: "Ultimately, then, this poem is an ode to survivors and to Gentileschi’s exquisitely manicured middle finger to the idea that she could be erased or silenced.”

"Self as Goat in Tree"

4 December 2019:

"Haven’t you too wished yourself a goat
perched punch-drunk on a linden tree,
blasé about the gold you might shit,
how it might serve both hunger and greed.
Haven’t you goaded yourself
to balance just a bit longer,
chew on some fugitive scents,
forget what a ditch the earth is." --Mihaela Moscaliuc, "Self as Goat in Tree"

This poem--and you can read the whole thing here--has sat in a folder for over a year, having arrived in October 2018 from the Poem-a-Day email. I am in the midst of a tough stretch here, one that is about to get a lot worse before it gets better. I find myself wishing to channel that inner goat in a tree, if only for a moment.

"Prayer to be Still and Know"

24 October 2019: Really needed this one today, courtesy of the Poem-a-Day email.

"...Let my ears forget
years trained to human chatter
wired into every room, even those empty
except of me, each broadcast and jingle
tricking me into being less
lonely than I am. Let my ears forget
the clack and rumble, our tambourining and fireworking
distractions, our roar of applause. Let my hands quit
their clapping and rest in a new kind of prayer, one
that doesn’t ask but listens, palms up in my lap."

"I Say the Thing for the First Time"

6 October 2019: Adrian Matejka is just so darn good. Really feeling this one. Got this (again) from the Poem-a-Day email, and it included this bit from the poet: “The most challenging kind of poem for me to write is a love poem, so I’m trying to write a whole book of them. This poem is about the instant when you tell someone you love them for the first time. They either say yes and everyone is happy or they respond in a non sequitur—they start dusting the shelves, tying their shoes or, as was the case in the moment that inspired this poem, they leave to go get more ice.”

It's a kind of 2019 Prufrock moment/aka my worst nightmare: “That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all.” But for me right now, this version is maybe more alive, real, and poignant. 

"Like You"

29 September 2019: Came across this poem today in a mailing from the Academy of American poets celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month. Love it.

"I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone."

"Underbelly"

25 September 2019: Really liking this poem, from the poem-a-day email.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning:

"Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone
until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either
so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear
and hands, underbelly and blade..."

"Had the Vines Budded, Were the Pomegranates in Bloom"

16 August 2019: This poem, by S. Brook Corfman, from the Poem-a-Day email list, fascinates me. I am pretty sure I don't understand it very well (yet?), but its imagery and moves are captivating. I especially love those first few lines, the surprising yet perfect turn they take us on: "My old lover was Catholic and lied to me about the smallest things. Now he’s dying and I’m trying to forgive everyone standing in line ahead of me at the grocery store." So much going on here about interiority and autonomy versus openness and vulnerability...

Poetic medicine...

9 July 2019: Spent some of today doing some planning for a research trip in August. And a lot of that made me anxious and uneasy. And then--right on time--arrived an email from the Academy of American Poets featuring poems about travel. Two of them stood out to me, both reminding me of some of what I like about travel (particularly about airports--and that list is very short).

The Rita Dove poem calls to mind how I like to imagine where everyone is heading and what their lives are like.

The Ellen Bass poem captures perhaps my favorite airport occurrence: the reunion. And gosh, this poem is charming and sweet.

March...

1 March 2019:

"Thanks"

26 November 2018: This W.S. Merwin poem arrived in my inbox on Thanksgiving Day (courtesy of the Poem-a-Day email) but I only read it closely today. And it works quite well for what has been on my mind today: a sort of mixture of anxiety about the world and for people I know and care about and a deep sense of gratitude for what I have and for the chance to keep working in/with/through the darkness. I thought about it when I met with a student who is really struggling and for whom I had no easy answers. I thought about it while Amy and I took a cold walk through campus as the sun went down and the cold winds kicked up.

This is a strange season for me every year. It gets quieter. I get quieter. And more serious. But the idea of this poem--that we keep saying "thank you"--really appeals to me. Not a bad strategy for getting through it all.

"we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is"

"If All My Relationships Fail and I Have No Children Do I Even Know What Love Is"

23 April 2018: Blown away this morning by this poem from Patrick Rosal. Here's what he said about it, courtesy of the little blurb from the "Poem-a-Day" email: "I guess it is a kind of failure not to learn how to love and be loved, but I also think it’s a kind of love to bear witness to love itself: to pay attention to it, especially in unlikely places and forms, to record it, to struggle to write love down so that it changes me. In that way, I feel an incredible sense of wealth."

Sometimes I think it is easy (too easy) to get caught up in what I don't have, but poems like this remind us that witnessing love is a kind of gift and a way of loving.

"Improvisation on Them"

18 April 2018:

I like this quite a bit:

"A beautiful loser, she takes pleasure in being incomplete.
He draws tears from grown men when he plucks his box.
She is reckless, never trained, so much a wound clock.
They move like movement in a still life picture.
She sings behind the beat and leans into the future.
Stepping out of sequence as though they’ve just begun."

Read the whole thing here.

This poem came to me from the Academy of American Poets' "Poem-a-Day" email, which also included this commentary from the poet, Linda Susan Jackson: "I was listening to Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favorite Things,’ and I began to imagine that like great musicians, we improvise—in relationships, through life, and in our writing. Time goes by, the writing goes on; we take risks, and, hopefully, we can recover from our mistakes. We start again, making it all seem effortless yet remarkable at the same time. At least, what I want this poem to suggest is that moments of improvisation can hold all the meaning, memory, and music, as well as a little magic.”

Love it.