20th Anniversary Countdown: Guest Post #4

In celebration of my 20th Blogiversary, I'm having guest posts in the lead-up to the big day. This is my fourth guest.

Please welcome Maya!

Maya is a rock star professor who regularly writes beautiful poetry on her blog PocoBrat. She also writes about her family, her cute dogs, and why living in Michigan is both the best and the worst. She has amazing home decor and I long to have her come to my house and somehow make it as cheery as her house.

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Congrats on twenty years to Engie! I love coming to this blog for her humor, honesty, and vulnerability. And she truly makes me want to be a better person when she shares her accountability stats. Also, I love, love Engie’s amazing fashion sense, sense of fairness, attention to sustainability, and her sweet and photogenic family. PLUS her voice—imbued with its general air of earnestness and kindness and sarcasm—is one of my favorite things in the world.

I think Engie likes to rib me about poetry. :) I still chuckle at that birthday card that announced, on the outside, “I wrote you a poem for your birthday.” And inside it said, “It’s called: I can’t believe you thought I wrote you a poem for your birthday!”

But… I love poetry. It’s the best. Robert Frost says a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Absolutely. I love the pieces that begin with a beautiful thought or image then—bam—INSIGHT! Poetry can feel like a jigsaw-crossword-puzzle-riddle-wordplay-stream-of-consciousness-salad, sometimes, and will make you work for meaning. What can I say—poetry has standards. Shouldn’t we all :)?

Sometimes the world seems too awful for beauty—the philosopher Theodor Adorno famously claimed, "There can be no poetry after Auschwitz." But as another great thinker (Dr. Malcolm in Jurassic Park—haha) said, "Life will find a way." And along with the impulse to life, comes poetry—the impulse to make sense of life, to mark it with beauty, generosity, and humor.

It feels like I've always loved poetry (thank you, Mom and Dad). My stay-at-home mom delighted in English poetry and memorized a lot of it with my sister and me as we progressed through school. My dad, (a staid and stern corporate powerhouse during the day) was the most indulgent, funny, feminist dad who shared so many stories and so much poetry—especially revolutionary and radical Tamil poetry—with the two daughters he doted on at home. I remember being five or six and wanting very badly to be a poet (and so I became a bad poet—whomp, whomp!).

In honor of Engie’s twentieth blog anniversary, here’s a top-twenty list organized around poetry based on bits that worked for me, my students, kids, and friends. There are lots of links here, but it’s barely a beginning. Pick something that intrigues you and explore from there? I hope you find plenty of delight and insight! XOXO ~ maya

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1. Best short poem: 
Laura Gilpin’s “Two-headed Calf.” Oh, READ THIS! Even if you think you don't get poetry. Reread this, even if you already have. It “kills” me every single damn time. 

Best translated short poem: Kuruntokkai "Red Earth and Pouring Rain" What a perfect metaphor for love, marriage, and mixing families.

2. Best long poem/novel:
Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. If you think the 1980s yuppie lifestyle in San Francisco cannot be put into rhyming sonnets, think again.

Best translated long poem/novel: Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Russians love this, you might too?

3. Best daily dose of poetry online: 
The anonymous Insta at Poetry is not a Luxury. (The title comes from Audre Lorde’s 1985 essay of the same name in which she famously declared “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”) [Note from NGS: Instant follow from me.]

4. Best daily dose of poetry delivered to your inbox:
Choose from (or subscribe to both!) 

poets.org (subscribe here: https://poets.org/poem-a-day)
and Rattle.com (subscribe here: https://www.rattle.com/info/about-us/ )
(Waking up in the morning while reading a poem whose title changes by the end can really wake you up! See “Credit” by James Washington Jr. for a boost.)

5. Sex poems:
There’s a lot out there. I would know—I used to edit the poetry section of the erotica magazine Clean Sheets. But my favorites are the Metaphysical Poets in general, John Donne in particular, and especially this one “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” I consider myself a postcolonial scholar who scoffs at imperialism, but when Donne (the Rev. Donne of the “no man is an island” sermon) mingles sex and colonization… Phew! I need to loosen my stays. “Licence my roving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below/O my America! my new-found-land/My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d/My Mine of precious stones, My Empire/How blest am I in this discovering thee!/To enter in these bonds, is to be free;/Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.” [Note from NGS: This poem was blocked by my work browser blocker. Hot stuff, indeed.]

If you happen to be sex-averse, I got you. You might like Louise Gluck's "Mock Orange."

And a sassy and sad poem about heterosexual hypocrisy and heteronormativity: Pat Parker "For the Straight Folks Who Don’t Mind Gays But Wish They Weren’t so Blatant.

6. Best poem as anthem/fight song:
Gwendolyn Brooks "We Real Cool." “We real cool. We/Left school.” The music of this! The ‘tude! I mutter it as I get dressed for a night out with friends.

7. Funny poetry T-Shirt: 
When poets take themselves too seriously, I think of this T-Shirt and chuckle.

8. What’s the most meme'd poem? 
It’s that William Carlos Williams poem about plums in the icebox you read at school. You can chuckle at all the memes it has spawned here.

9. Poems in other media:
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is the winner and it’s frequently misunderstood—for e.g., in the TV show Breaking Bad.

The award for a poem read interestingly in a novel goes to Shakespeare's Sonnet #130.

In Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, One of the protagonists Irie thinks the lines (“If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;/If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head”)

suggest that the lady in the poem may not be a white, but her high school English teacher wants none of it. (Bad teacher, BTW!)

10. Poetry you can read for its incantatory power, almost as a mantra.
It may not always be clear what's going on an initial read, but the melody, wordplay, and magic are so strong, you can't stop. Then suddenly it’s like those magic-eye pictures where all is revealed. Find this magic in T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and the Jesuit priest Gerald Manley Hopkins.

If you enjoy getting lost in language, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is a whole volume about just one color—guess which?

11. Best poems about making sense of our beautiful and terrifying world:
A real-estate-themed poem by Maggie Smith called "Good Bones". Those last lines!

And a heartbreaker of a climate change poem: Paul Nelson’s “Elegy for Tahlequah’s Calf.” I dare you not to cry. [Note from NGS: Count me in the crying club.]

Want more about diaspora? See Marilyn Chin’s "How I got That Name"

"The further west we go,/we'll hit east;/the deeper down we dig,/we'll find China."

Want more about globalization? See Meena Alexander’s "Krishna." “Still, how much can you bear on your back?/You’ve lost one language, gained another, lost a third./There’s nothing you’ll inherit,/neither per stirpes nor per capita"

12. The “If You Like Mary Oliver” Section:
I think a lot of Engie’s readers like Mary Oliver. If that’s you, you may also like Wendell Berry, Anais Nin, Emily Dickinson, Khalil Gibran, Maya Angelou, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rupi Kaur, Warsan Shire, Pablo Neruda, Li Bai, Charles Bukowski, Wallace Stevens, etc. They’re all seriously good, just pick a random page and go!

Don’t miss: 
13th century Persian mystic Rumi 
17th century Spanish nun Sor Juana 
19th century Transcendentalist Walt Whitman 
Early 20th century Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore

13. Poem that became a Google Doodle: 
Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise." “’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells/Pumping in my living room.” LOL. I’m so glad I share a name with this late, great.

14. Searing political poems: 
Langston Hughes “I too.” “I, too, sing America./I am the darker brother./They send me to eat in the kitchen/When company comes…” Ooch. Burn.

Poem about ongoing geopolitical conflict/genocide Refaat Al Areer’s final poem "If I Must Die." “If I must die,/you must live/to tell my story/to sell my things…” Many of the libraries made by protesting students inside the college encampments are named in honor of this poet who was killed by bombs the week after he wrote this.

And here’s a short poem by Marwan Makhoul “In order for me to write poetry/that is not political,/I must listen to the birds/and in order to hear the birds/the war planes must be silent.”

15. Best poems about parents: 
If you love them, read Dylan Thomas’s "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night." 

If you hate 'em, read Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse." [Note from NGS: The lines "Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself" really made me feel seen.]

16. Poem that always surprises me and my students by how current it is: 
Audre Lorde's "Power" (1978). Wow—how things have NOT changed!

“A policeman who shot down a ten-year-old in Queens/stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood/and a voice said, “Die you little motherfucker” and/there are tapes to prove it.”

17. Viral spoken word Poem a tie between 
Patricia Lockwood’s "Rape Joke" (as brutal as the title, CW for rape)

“The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.”

and Aya de Leon’s "If Women Ran Hip Hop" (Quirky, cute, punchy, feminist!) “If women ran hip hop/The only folks dancing in cages would be dogs & cats/From the local animal shelter/ Excited about getting adopted by pet lovers in the crowd” LOVE.

18. Poem you’ll have to reread immediately! 
"Refugees" by Brian Bilston. This one’s practically a lightbulb exploding in your brain. I won’t give anything else away.

And in a similar vein, Ross Gay’s linked poems: Read "Bringing the Shovel Down" and then read "Again" to feel better. I almost didn’t name our new puppy Max because of this set of poems.

19. Recent U.S. poet laureates of note: 
Ada Limon (current poet laureate, the first Latina to hold the position). In The Carrying she writes: “What if, instead of carrying /a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”

and Joy Harjo (first indigenous poet laureate) In The Last Song, she writes: “An ancient chant/ that my mother knew/came out of a history/woven from wet tall grass/in her womb.”

20. Trivia: 

Connect the dots between poet icon Emily Dickinson and pop icon Taylor Swift.
and 

Go ahead and wonder what the prominent 19th-century poet Phillis Wheatley would have been called if she hadn’t been kidnapped at the age of seven from West Africa and then named for the ship that brought her to the U.S. (Phillis) and the family she was enslaved to (Wheatley).

BONUS: 

• Want a list of classics to memorize and recite? I got you—here’s a list of the greats. 
• Want to improve/start/brush up on your poetry reading skills? This right here can be a solid resource. 
• Me seeing “poems” in the things my kids said when they were tots here and here. 
• I miss my darling Scout who passed away every day, so my favorite poem right now is about him.

Happy Twentieth Blog-versary, dear Engie! Here’s to another twenty at least!

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Do you have a favorite bit of poetry?