We often move through life with preconceived notions about what will affect us, and what will make us the person we hope to become. Yet I see Jane Hirshfield’s “What I Like” as a full awakening to all the ways we are touched by each day, with its many chance encounters and so-called “mistakes.”
Though written during the pandemic, Jane Hilberry’s honest poem resonates at this moment as well, when so many of us find ourselves reemerging into the world, heading out to offices and workplaces again (or deciding to make larger life changes).
During such divided times, it can be easy—when we disagree so fundamentally—to forget the humanity of other people. What might seem to us a gesture of supporting the greater good and the well-being of our society (like getting vaccinated, for instance), can just as easily seem to someone else a threat to their liberty, or a source of fear for their own health. What is perhaps most shocking at this point in the pandemic is just how separate we can feel from the people we love most, from family members with whom we share a "kinship of flesh," as the title of Rebecca Foust's poem points out.
As much as I value silence and down-time, especially when spent in nature, I still resist the stillness I most need in order to glimpse, as Laura Foley puts it so well, “the world below the surface” of our stressful lives.
In this poem, and indeed throughout his stunning first collection of poetry, Worldly Things, Michael Kleber-Diggs fearlessly enacts his own rebellion against the cultural stereotypes of fathers and men as hard, stoical, often detached from their loved ones.
One of the basic questions we can ask ourselves is this: Who or what am I not appreciating right now? When my father was still alive, I seldom took the time to notice those work-shirts he’d shed as soon as he got home, draping them over the kitchen chairs. My father worked long hours as a maintenance mechanic at a factory that made plastic toolboxes until he grew too weak with Hepatitis C to keep it up. Now, of course, I’d give just about anything to be back in our old house some evening, watching as his rusty Dodge pick-up pulled into the driveway, seeing him smile as he threw open the screen door and greeted us all.
Young people have the uncanny ability to distill what we believe are complex concepts into the simplest, most relatable human terms. The speaker’s daughter in “Mimesis” clearly does this, and with nothing more than a sincere question asked at the end of the poem: “that’s how others/Become refugees isn’t it?” With those few words spoken in defense of a spider, she calls us all into a greater empathy with the world that we might not have realized was possible.
As Christine Kitano shows in her moving poem, if we’re present enough to another person, we can actually become attuned to what they’re feeling. In fact, even the act of paying deep attention to a stranger can create a sense of connection, no matter how fleeting.
In “Elation,” January Gill O’Neil exquisitely captures the sense of privacy and relief that can arise when we enter a forest, even if it happens to be in the middle of a bustling city. O’Neil’s poem reminds me of what David Wagoner once wrote: “If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,/You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows/Where you are. You must let it find you.”
One of the most beautiful and contemporary wonder tale books I’ve seen, My Favourite Book of Fairy Tales, was published near the end of the Golden Age of illustration in 1921. It is illustrated by an exceptionally talented artist, acclaimed in her own lifetime, who history has transformed into an elusive mystery: Jennie Harbour.
Laura Grace Weldon begins her poignant poem with a list of what she has come to miss ever since the pandemic first hit. Confined to her home, she pays special attention to those people she once encountered on a daily basis out in the world—her fellow walkers, the cashier she’d learned to recognize, as well as the librarian “whose voice,” she points out, “is soft as my mother’s was.”
MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish shares her stories of experiences with selected books featuring Nick Cave, Jen Bervin, Mary Ruefle, Barbara Bourland, Carl Belz, J.M. Arms Sheldon, and Camille Flammarion.
It seems essential that in Danusha Laméris’ poem, humans don’t make a real appearance until the very end when she posits that we are “offspring” of the stars, “scattered so far beyond reach.”
In “Let This Day,” Annie Lighthart makes the case for not trying to force some immediate alteration in outlook, and for not resisting it either. Instead, she says, “Let it change, rearrange.” Her words here remind me of what Rilke once wrote: “No feeling is final.”
It can be useful and centering to meditate on the sounds that begin our days, becoming attuned to certain birdsongs or noises of the human-made world. In this poem, Alberto Ríos employs a playfulness with language to convey what calls down and brings the morning for him.
Spring Ephemera by Lailah Dainin Shima I don’t know How tiny, chartreuse Spears push through Thawing earth, penetrate Layers of leathered Oak leaves, reaching Unseen sun, not moved By fear or even hope Not freighted with worry How blood rivers its way Through [...]
100 Word Book Review: Book from the Ground by Xu Bing. In the 1920s, a group of scholars in Vienna tried devising a universal picture language called isotype. Today, Shigetaka Kurita has perhaps achieved that vision with emojis. And in 2012 Xu Bing wrote a book without words from emojis and other contemporary symbols.
By describing first how her friend can turn any action or so-called chore into a form of prayer, and then showing us the way she does this “today” by folding laundry, Angela Narciso Torres teaches us to do the same. She writes so carefully and lovingly of how she smoothes, folds, stacks and drapes all of her and her family’s clothing that we can’t help but feel a sense of calmness and order emanating from this otherwise simple scene.
Ted Kooser is a master of capturing the fullness of a moment in time, often using the seemingly ordinary materials of everyday life that he finds at hand. In the instance of “Easter Morning,” on an overcast and rainy day, even by the second line, Kooser seems to have found delight in the simple mist that catches on the windows “as if the house were flying through a cloud.”
I have a copy of a brand new book, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World, sitting on the edge of my desk. Inside it is inscribed: "Hope we stay in the same reality. Love, Joseph." At the time, I did not fully appreciate the extent to which Joseph Keckler, the author, is a dimension-traveling wizard. But I already had inklings.
"FLITTER / is what she said but what she meant had nothing / to do with the lighting from one bloom to the next / by a monarch or an equally colorful diva at the bar. / What she meant was your privates, your girlie parts, /something you better soap up daily and watch / like a spectacled hawk."
I have breathed into too many balloons / put my fingers in so many cakes / had my body scanned with fingerprints / written out my dreams in lines of the night / traced words into storm clouds / mixed water with mint and bourbon...
There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store / with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack / that should have been bagged in double layers / —so that before you are even out the door / you feel the weight of the jug dragging / the bag down, stretching the thin / plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until / bottom suddenly splits.
The 1819 Edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales (Photo: Andreas Berthel © Stadt Kassel / Kulturamt) Murder. Infanticide. Mutilation. Incest. While true love intermittently raises its pretty head, Grimm's fairy tales are far darker than the Disneyfied versions so many of us know. [...]
For Proust," Susan Howe writes in her Preface to The Gorgeous Nothings, "a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state; it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that once had been present." The fragments Howe is specifically referring to are the envelopes left [...]