Praise
by Kelli Russell Agodon
Find me wild about stir-fry, about red velvet
sofas and the people who sleep inside books
and dream about commas. We are flooded
with forgetfulness, with fallen plum blossoms
misspelling our names on the driveway. Praise
our too many expectations, how we overestimate
the weather, each other, overestimate how deer
will appear if we arrive with food. Because reality
can be a knife, we sometimes ache to tear open
the tea bag, the ketchup packet, because wine
arrives ready to be poured, we are foolish
and happy—though our clothes do not fit,
we return to being alive and living
between roadblocks and detours, driving
our fingers into the edge of each other’s
pockets. Praise the bare trees that tried
to spell our names for their belief
they could—spells and misspellings,
fail and fail better, how lucky we are
just to be here, both of us touching each other
through these words, with all this exasperating joy.
From The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection & Joy.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Read poetry by Kelli Russell Agodon in her newest book, Dialogues with Rising Tides, available for purchase online.
The poet Ross Gay has said: “Gratitude is a grave thing.” In other words, gratefulness is a serious undertaking, since any appreciation for what’s around us is also a recognition of its brevity and impermanence. Kelli Russell Agodon’s exuberant “Praise” embodies this truth by listing all the seemingly plain things in life (“stir-fry . . . red velvet sofas . . . fallen plum blossoms”) that bring her pleasure, in spite of the disappointments and failures, large and small, that come along with them. Her poem implies that we’re meant to hold it all at once because an honest praise also honors the difficulties, our struggles to embrace such smaller moments of grace. The “exasperating joy” she names at the end perhaps also refers to the fact that pleasure often frustrates us with its unexpected and short-lived nature. Joy annoys us because we can never force it to stay; we must simply embrace its appearance and eventual, inevitable vanishing. Maybe, this open-armed poem suggests, all we can do is learn to praise our pleasures when they arrive, and practice not turning from those sudden bursts as we accept they must soon move on.
Invitation for Writing & Reflection: What are some of the sources of joy and simple things in your life that you could praise right now, alongside the many disappointments and sorrows? You might begin by writing the word “Praise,” over and over and filling in the rest, or use this poem’s first words, “Find me wild about . . . “ to spark some images.
ABOUT THE POET: Kelli Russell Agodon
Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest book is Dialogues with Rising Tides from Copper Canyon Press. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her other books include Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (Winner of the Foreword Indies Book of the Year in Poetry and Washington State Book Awards Finalist), Hourglass Museum (Finalist for the Washington State Book Prize and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Prize), The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (coauthored with Seattle poet Martha Silano), and Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry. Agodon has received awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Dorothy Rosenberg Foundation, Artist Trust, and her work has appeared in the magazines such as Atlantic, the Nation, the Harvard Review, and O: The Oprah Magazine. She lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State on traditional lands of the Chimacum, Coast Salish, S’Klallam, and Suquamish people where she is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. Kelli is currently part of a project between local land trusts and artists to help raise awareness for the preservation of land, ecosystems, and biodiversity called Writing the Land. Learn more at agodon.com and twosylviaspress.com
POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS
James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.
FURTHER EXPLORATION
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