Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined topic chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-third day of the month is "Atmosphere."
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I had to get to the community center early to set up for the lecture series, but when I got there, staff had already done all the work of setting up the chairs and the sign out front. I just turned on lights and waited to greet people and direct them to the room. The speaker was a poet, a man who has spent his life's work attempting to work out his feelings of grief surrounding war and the death of his father, combined with the bright light of the love he feels for his wife and children.
It's a lovely room with a vaulted ceiling and a lovely blue on the wall. The floors squeak whenever you move and I will never be able to think about the war in Syria again without hearing the remnants of someone shifting uncomfortably in their seat. Were they uncomfortable because the chairs are kind of terrible? Were they cold? Were they trying to figure out their own feelings about grief and navigating a privileged position in which the idea of being a homeless refugee seems so far away? Was the atmosphere in the room too much for them, so they were folding their arms around their stomachs in an act of self-preservation?
The presentation he gave was not one I expected. I thought he would just do a poetry reading. But instead he talked to us about what poetry means to him in an exploratory essay that was powerful and asked questions. Every poem begins and ends with a question. What are your questions? What are the big ideas in your own life you grapple with? What is the point of art in the face of war, famine, and climate destruction?
I will be thinking about this for days and weeks and months to come. In the meantime, what's your favorite poem or who is your favorite poet?
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ReplyDeletePoetry isn’t part of my life, but I did like John Donne back in uni. Sue must have every Mary Oliver collection. I don’t dislike poetry, but it just isn’t part of my life right now.
ReplyDeleteI don't really read it much, either, but I'd like to dip my toes in, I think.
Delete(Reposting without links this time.) It would be impossible for me to have a single favorite poem or poet because I contain multitudes (nerdy Whitman joke), but these days I like the PoetryIsNotALuxury Insta (the title comes from Audre Lorde). Like everyone else on the internet, I love Laura Gilpin's "Two-headed Calf" and Maggie Smith's "Good Bones." And the double-header sequence of Ross Gay's "Bringing the Shovel Down" and "Again." Those two poems MUST be read in sequence, but perhaps people who love dogs may want to give it a miss!
ReplyDeleteThese are great suggestions and I'm definitely going to look them all up!
DeleteI will forever love "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" by TS Eliot, "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman, "Bright Star" by Keats, and "Annabel Lee" by Poe. I've read so much and taught so much poetry (and taught students who became poets) that it's hard to say that I have a favourite. I have Loved Poems, but even then, I love so many. I must also mention Emily Dickinson. It often depends who I'm in the mood to read.
ReplyDeleteBestest Friend is a huge Langston Hughes fan and I've always found him to be more accessible than some of the more "classical" poets that we were taught in school, including some of the ones you've mentioned. Maybe I should revisit the ones I was taught in high school.
DeleteMy absolute favourite poet is Mary Oliver, but I have been reading a lot of contemporary poetry these days which I love. Rupi Kaur is one of them. I recently read Louise Gluck on Suzanne's recommendation, and that did not disappoint. When I was in university my favourite poem was The Lady Of Shallott, and it still is very wonderful to read. Oh, and I enjoyed John Donne back in the day.
ReplyDeleteOh, these are such great recs. I'll definitely check out Oliver and Gluck.
DeleteWe have no wood floors in our house, but I think I associate creeky wood floors with travels we've done where we visit older, historical buildings- like homes from hundreds of years ago, or old museums out west, etc. I love it. Very lovely room indeed you have there.
ReplyDeleteRe shifting in your seat, that would totally be me. And not for any of the reasons you listed. I am just naturally fidgety. We have weekly huddles for work where we are on camera, just sitting and looking at the screen for 1-2 hours. I feel like I am always moving slightly, and everyone else sits perfectly still like a soldier for the whole time. Like, I fix my hair. I twist an earring. Then I move my butt a little to the left. Then I drink some tea. Then I shift one hand to under my chin, elbow propped on my desk. Then I rearrange my foot position. It has nothing to do with being uncomfortable or even bored - it is just something I do. I was talking about this with someone the other day- I have a hard time sitting perfectly still for extended time periods. One of my kids has adhd and they say it is typically genetic- while I'm undiagnosed, I have shared with his doctor that if he got it from anyone in our family, it was most likely me. LOL!! (In reality, I don't really know, but I have a lot of the general tendencies.)
Oh my goodness...THIS IS ME! When I have to "sit still" for something, I immediately start to fidget. I'll scratch my nose or touch my hair or cross and uncross my legs.
DeleteThe chairs are SO uncomfortable. And the room was cold. I was shifting like crazy, but the presentation was riveting. I'm a fidgeter, too!
DeleteWow. This sounds fascinating. I wish I could have heard this presentation. i don't read poetry regularly, but Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken is one I read in high school and I still recite parts of it to myself on a regular basis ("Two roads diverge in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.") I also like the Mary Oliver poems that I've seen on people's blogs. I do like poetry though, and should read more of it.
ReplyDeleteI don't read much poetry, either, to be honest, so I'm using this as a way to crowdsource a place to begin. The lecture really energized me to read more and the examples he used were absolutely lovely. I'll see how it goes once I collect everything from this post!
DeleteLove this post. Very thoughtful. And the presentation sounds very moving.
ReplyDeleteI have many favorite poets. Louise Gluck, C.D. Wright, Mary Oliver, Rita Dove, Linda Gregg, C K Williams, Carl Philips. Plath. Rilke. Szymborska. Bishop. Donald Hall. I even find a lot of meaning in Ted Hughes's poems, even though it seems like he was kind of a terrible person. Poetry is so good at looking at big topics through a very precise lens, at giving you a way to access things that may be otherwise unknowable.
This post reminds me that once again, I have fallen out of the habit of reading poetry when I want to be a person who reads poetry every day.
Oh, I have never been a person who reads poetry every day. I admire that it's a goal for you!
DeleteRobert Frost has written some of my favourite traditional poems (I have a huge print of Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening on my bedroom wall). Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W. B. Yeats has deep sentimental significance; my now husband whispered it into my ear when we were dating and my stomach still flip-flops remembering that moment. Mary Oliver is great, though some of her work does feel like a bit of a slog. I'm a huge fan of lyrical music, and I consider music to be poetry, so that's my favourite genre...
ReplyDeleteI am fascinated that lots of people have recommended Mary Oliver, but you refer to it as "a bit of a slog." People are so different!!
DeleteI really LOVE some of her poetry, but other poems felt like walking through sludge. To be fair, I read her compilations quickly, but some of the nature poems felt very tedious to me. That said, she has some INCREDIBLE poems, too (I even blogged about them a few times, but this is the main post I think with various excerpts: http://elisabeth-frost.com/?p=9635)
DeleteOooh, poetry. I actually do read it - a new thing, for me, coming at the recommendation of a kind of life mentor (for lack of a better description). My preferences... David Whyte (has both prose and poetry; Consolations is [for me] a mind-blowing compilation of prose), Mary Oliver, but also John O'Donohue, Auden, Maya Angelou... and some more modern poets I follow on IG. I think you have to find the ones who speak to YOU. What I like is not, most likely, going to be what you like. Maybe delve into some compilations? Wander around the interwebs?
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