Poems, Poems, Everywhere
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
–Charles Bukowski
Town House Books posts a poem every Monday morning on social media to help our customers “start their week off on the right foot.” We began this series in 2020 during the Covid pandemic and just kept right on going.
It is a pleasure to share poetry in this way each week, and since April is National Poetry Month, and given the space limitations of social media, we want to take a bit more time here to talk about some favorites that have appeared in our posts over the past five years.
from: The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
You see, I am alive, I am alive
Our first post in October of 2020 was an excerpt from N. Scott Momaday’s poem The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee. Tsoai-talee is Momaday’s Kiowa name, meaning “rock-tree-boy” and refers to an 865-foot volcanic butte sacred to the Kiowa people.
The feeling of exaltation and celebration expressed in the refrain, “I stand in good relation,” was a great comfort during that time of confusion and alienation early on in the pandemic when absolutely nothing in the world felt like it was in good relation to anything else.
Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, is a collection published by Copper Canyon Press that was culled from the hundreds of small poems that were part of the personal correspondence between Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. Kooser is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and former Poet Laureate of the United States. Harrison was a prolific and accomplished novelist, poet, and essayist, elected into the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 2007.
The poems are full of wry humor and quiet wisdom, and since there is no individual attribution given to each poem, it is interesting to try to identify the differences between the voices of the poets.
Alone in the car
we try to tell ourselves
some good news.
-Ted Kooser & Jim Harrison
Incidentally, the recently published anniversary edition of Braided Creek includes an introduction by another Town House favorite: Naomi Shihab Nye.
Nye is an acclaimed Palestinian American poet who writes poems and stories for both adults and children. Her poems often express seemingly simple yet significant considerations of the world.
Please Describe How You Became a Writer
Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first grade text book. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?
-Naomi Shihab Nye
Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa is a favorite because of the sly humor and poignancy in his haiku.
I know this world
is a drop of dew—
and still… still…
-Issa
My Dead Friends
I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question
to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.
Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?
They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,
to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were—
it’s green in there, a green vase,
and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,
whatever he says I’ll do.
-Marie Howe
A poem that exerts a quiet yet powerful influence is Marie Howe’s My Dead Friends found in the excellent anthology, Risking Everything. We could only include a small excerpt in the post, but here is the poem in its entirety.
In her most recent book, New and Selected Poems, Howe’s work continues to inspire us. Her observations of nature and reflections upon her own life often contain timely wit and insight. For example, while some people complain that they become “invisible” to the culture as they age, Howe exclaims:
Finally, I can slip through the world without being so adamantly in it.
-Marie Howe
Ada Limón, the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate and another favorite of ours, often incorporates short vignettes from her personal life experience into her poetry—for example this touching tribute to her stepfather as she describes his attentive tenderness in these lines from her poem, A Good Story.
But right now all I want is a story about human kindness,
the way once, when I couldn’t stop crying
because I was fifteen and heartbroken,
he came in and made me eat a small pizza
he’d cut up into tiny bites until the tears stopped.
Maybe I was just hungry, I said.
And he nodded, holding out the last piece.
-Ada Limón
We find poetry all around and within us, even when we aren’t particularly looking for it. We may stumble across it in the poetic quality of a piece of prose, or quite literally, as is the case with Henry David Thoreau, in the naturally composed sentences scattered throughout his journals. Just add line breaks and there’s your poem!
It is as sweet a
mystery to me as ever,
what this world is.
-Henry Thoreau
Poetry turns up everywhere, and we are always expanding our definition of what poetry is. You don’t have to set out to read poetry in order to find yourself experiencing it as part of everyday life and deriving comfort and sustenance from it.
These are a few of our other favorite poetry posts:
If you are interested in exploring further, please take a look at our wide-ranging collection of new and classic poetry, and you can also link to a few of our earlier conversations about poetry: Meeting Your Muse, Poetry Is For You, and Musings For Poetry Month.
Thanks for being a part of our poetry adventure.
Happy Reading!
This poetry issue is dedicated to
our beloved friend
Joan O’Leary
(1935-2024)
