There's a poem for that | Daybreak Note #212 | Sept. 20, 2021
Adding the electric understanding of poems into the rhythm of our days.
Good morning, dear!
I hope you are looking ahead to a week dotted with a pocketful of delights (an enticing book, a walk in the cusp of fall, a poem). Yes, a poem! Maybe? Hmm. Maybe not? It seems like “reading poetry” either evokes a swooning of sorts or an uncomfortable look of bemusement.
I was once not a poetry fan — I mean, I loved Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss’ rhymes as a kid, but the modern-day poetry I found in magazines or classic, long and heralded poems often struck me as completely indecipherable. What was the poet trying to convey? Was I intended to understand? What did it mean that I didn’t understand?
But lately, I’ve been finding more and more poems that do make sense to me. More than make sense. I’m finding poems that bottle a feeling, a moment, an understanding that I hadn’t known could be put into words — perhaps I hadn’t even noticed it at all, but once it was put into a poem, I knew it instantly. There’s a kind of electric understanding in poems, some poems, for each of us.
One way to explore poetry is to invite it into your inbox. The Poetry Foundation offers a free Poem of the Day via email. (Admittedly, sometimes I puzzle at them. But sometimes they ring vivid and true. You might find different poems alive to you.)
My lovely friend and poet Rebecca Sturgeon offers a poem via email Wednesday-Sunday in her newsletter, Our Daily Breath, short, echoing, tactile poems. I’m stunned over and over by what she distills in a few lines of observation, history, recollection, supposition.
Here is Rebecca’s poem “A Matter of Hope,” from yesterday’s newsletter, prefaced with this thought:
I had a great conversation about hope today — about how we can keep it going even in the face of some pretty dark moments. I’ll be writing more about this, somewhere. But the tiny idea that is growing is the idea that we need to carry hope like a hospice worker who knows their patients won’t recover. Just let it show you where you can provide ease in the next moment. And the next one. And the one after that. One moment at a time.
A Matter of Hope
If it feels like we are hospice workers for a civilization—
because we are—
The thing to do is alter the molecular structure
of hope.
Remove the spaces between atoms.
Compress matter into its densest, darkest form —
darker, even, than your thoughts at 3am on a Sunday.
Make hope a small, weighty thing.
A thing that can’t help but leave a mark
anywhere within its small reach.
So heavy it is that you can only carry it
(carefully, slowly)
into the very next moment.
Hope is the thing with density,
that lingers in the soul,
and follows on your next exhale,
and won’t be crushed
at all.
— Rebecca Sturgeon
(You can subscribe to Our Daily Breath here.)
When you read a poem like that one, or Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones”, or William Stafford’s “You Reading This, Be Ready,” suddenly, poetry feels less like an uncertain detour and more like a drink of water you hadn’t realized you needed.
Elliott Holt, in The New York Times, wrote an essay recommending the habit of picking a poem at the first day of each month, and reading it every day of that month. Elliott writes:
“I can’t take credit for this idea; my friend Jenny suggested it to me years ago, after someone proposed it to her. That first year, I joined Jenny in reading Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” in January. Repetition led to revelation: Every day, I noticed new things in the text. By the end of the month, I knew the poem by heart.
Since then, this practice has become essential. I have my own spin on it: I always read my selected poem aloud, to hear the rhythm, and I like to read it first thing in the morning. Reading the poem at dawn, with my coffee, is a kind of meditation. And rereading the same poem forces me to slow down, to hone my observations.”
This reminds me of listening to a favorite song on the drive to work, or the walk around the block, embedding the rhythm into your day.
There are infinite ways to weave poetry into this hour, this day, this week. I wonder what you might read, feel, notice. I wonder what you might discover.
With love,
Brianne