Poetry Bootcamp: Five Steps to Learn How to Love Poetry Again
For National Poetry Month, I wrote an article for our local paper which was published today. Along with sharing my fondness for poetry, I urged readers to give poetry a second chance. Many of you last read a poem in 5th grade! Your view of poetry might be, it’s a bunch of nonsense about daffodils, fair maidens and walking in the woods. Well, poetry is interested in everything. Growing up as a mixed-race child. The war in Iraq. Love. Artichokes.
Maybe you’re astonished to learn people still read—and write—poetry. The average American, like Edgar Allen Poe’s raven, might be quoted on the subject of poetry: “Nevermore!”
C’mon people, give poetry a chance! Join the housewives, blue collar workers and pop stars who write, and appreciate poetry.
So consider this poetry bootcamp. I’m going to introduce you to a five simple, easy-to-understand poems that will get you off your miserable, potato-chip-eating, entertainment-bubble metaphorical couch, and into the world of imagination and mystery. There will be no yelling or standing in squadron formations, but you will have to make some effort to leave behind the civilian world and enter the world of poetry.
Whether you arrived here from that column, or you’re just curious about poetry, below are some suggestions of poems/poets that I like, that I think you might like. Think of these as some warm up stretches. Think of these as a poetry appetizer course. Perhaps after sampling these bite-sized pieces of deliciousness, you may be hungry for more. Perhaps after doing these five poetry “push-ups” and running a 5K, you may want to run a poetry marathon, i.e., read an ENTIRE POETRY BOOK!
A good place to find more poetry is your local library. Or, thanks to the Internet, you can search topics (“daffodils” “fair maidens” “artichokes”) and poets, at the wonderful Poetry Foundation website.
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Poem 1
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver
(From The House Light, Beacon Press Boston, 1990)
*Mary Oliver is currently America’s best-selling poet. Some more formal, academic poets see her as low brow, and even sentimental. She writes in a simple, restrained and emotional style–often about nature, or the human spirit. Maybe that’s why the average citizen likes her poetry. (I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.)
Oliver has written hundreds of glorious nature/spirit poems: here’s one more, The Kingfisher, where she asks, “How could there be a day in your whole life / that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?”
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Poem 2
After a Death
Once there was a shock that
left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
~Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly
(From The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations by Robert Bly, published by Harper Collins. Copyright © 2004 by Robert Bly.)
*When I first read “After a Death,” I felt like it both punched me, and kissed me. I felt awe. I could eat those two first lines for dinner, every night, and never be hungry again.
It’s a beautiful poem, about a difficult subject. The poet stays away from sappy cliches and trying to offer false comfort. I feel a bit lonely when I read this, a bit disconnected–much like my state of mind after losing my mother. (A good poem allows you to feel something real, not just tell you how you should feel.)
Tranströmer won the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one of Sweden’s greatest poets. Two more poems, if you like Tranströmer’s sparse, contemplative style.)
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Poem 3
Miscegenation
In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.
They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi.
A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.
Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.
My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.
When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.
I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name—
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.
~Natasha Trethewey
(From Native Guard, copyright © 2007)
*Natasha Trethewey is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. I included an excerpt from her poem “Flounder” in News Tribune article. Trethewey is one of the most powerful modern poets to speak on identity, race, otherness and belonging in very personal ways. I love how this poem is playful about the names of cities, and the story of Jesus, but it’s about a very serious subject.
Trethewey is a poet of geography: the South, Mississippi where she grew up, the land of her mixed-race childhood, the no-man’s land of identity. She’s not a fancy or modernist poet with complicated structures. The thing I most love about Trethewey, that made her my favorite poet of 2012, is her bravery. She is fearless in a strange, compassionate way, and she talks about a foundational subject–race–that is easier to avoid because of controversy and complicated feelings.
Want to read more? The New York Times has four other beauties from Trethewey. The first one–about fishing with her father–is in my favorite poems file.
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Poem 4
Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?
If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck
in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,
the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—
then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance,
bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them—
and when I say I am married, it means I married
all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.
Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many
slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal
for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot
on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps
in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another
whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single
one of them wonders what time I am coming home.
~Aimee Nezhukumatathil
(From Lucky Fish. Copyright © 2011 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Tupelo Press.)
*Aimee Nezhukumatathil is one of my favorite poets–not just because she has a super-long last name like myself. Or because she’s Asian-American like me. Well, I do like both those things, but her poetry is full of wonder, wit, science, nature, human foibles, wry observations.
If you enjoyed this imaginative poem, try Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, another one that I love–you don’t have to have an extra long name like Gudaitis or Nezhukumatathil to appreciate her humor and beautiful language.
Her book “Lucky Fish” was my top poetry book of 2010. I fell head over heels in love with that book, and wanted to kiss every page.
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Poem 5
The Hurt Locker
Nothing but hurt left here.
Nothing but bullets and pain
and the bled-out slumping
and all the fucks and goddamns
and Jesus Christs of the wounded.
Nothing left here but the hurt.
Believe it when you see it.
Believe it when a twelve-year-old
rolls a grenade into the room.
Or when a sniper punches a hole
deep into someone’s skull.
Believe it when four men
step from a taxicab in Mosul
to shower the street in brass
and fire. Open the hurt locker
and see what there is of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls.
~Brian Turner
(From Here, Bullet. Copyright © 2005 by Brian Turner.)
*This is one of my very favorite poems ever. If you’ve seen the movie “The Hurt Locker,” you may recognize the ending of this poem, which was the inspiration for the title of Kathryn Bigelow’s award-winning film.
Poets have been writing about war and warriors for thousands of years. Soldier poets like Turner have been defying society’s stereotypes throughout history. He’s a poet who also patrolled the streets of Iraq.
Turner has an amazing eye for detail, for compressed language that feels tense and ready to explode. One of his poems, Hwy 1, has a couple of lines about a crane that made me stop breathing for a few seconds.
He’s a master at not just telling you what war is like, but allowing you to feel what it’s like there. All the poems in “Here, Bullet” are fine, powerful pieces of writing. You can read my other favorite Turner poem here.)
Well, there now. That wasn’t so bad. If you’d like to find some more good poetry, here’s a link to all the poems on this blog. A few of my favorite poems are there, plus a couple of mine. If you enjoyed reading poetry, perhaps you might even think of writing one yourself. It’s not really that hard to cook an artichoke, or write a poem, or do anything unfamiliar. The important thing is to enjoy and express yourself.
National Poetry Month is a great time to remind ourselves that poetry has been around for tens of thousands of years–before writing was invented, before Twitter and Jersey Shore and Call of Duty. If you’d like to hear some fine local poets here in Tacoma, come out and support the arts/poetry community tonight (Tuesday, April 23, 6:00 pm at the downtown library) at the Tacoma Poet Laureate ceremony). More info here, about halfway down.
Small addendum: if you’re reading this on your phone, the smallness of the screen totally screws up the line breaks. Sad face. Line breaks (where poets choose to stop each line of a poem) are super important. As important as the finish line of a race, or the line you sign your name on to get married. Until the Internet figures out how to handle poetry in a better manner, it may be best to read poetry on a larger screen like a laptop or iPad.
Photo credit: J Brew, used with permission under Creative Commons
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