It’s April! Which means: National Poetry Month. National Poetry Month is seven kinds of awesome and it warms the black cockles of my heart that people are celebrating poetry. I think probably the most meaningful and important things are said simply, in gesture, in things that are quiet or even unsaid–just known. You can say a lot of things over a morning table with coffee and not speak a word. All you have to do is watch.
I wish I had the health and the time to post a poem once a day in April, but then I thought about it, and wondered, why not just post sentences–words I’ve read that make my jaw drop–that’s poetry, no? There is poetry in prose. All the time. Just ask my bookshelf. I have so many books, dog-eared with words that ring true and make me stop in my tracks and think: YES.
So I’ll be sharing little tidbits of delicious words with you at times this month. Sometimes, those delicious words are just what we need.
~via Haven Kimmel from A Girl Named Zippy
There are two photographs, taken at a slumber party at Julie’s house, just before Dana disappeared forever. In the first we are trying to form a human pyramid, like cheerleaders. Dana, Anita, Annette are on the bottom, being always the tallest. On top are Rose and Julie and Kirsten. We’re laughing wildly into the camera. In the second the pyramid has toppled and we are lying in a heap on the floor, and the expression on our faces is quite different. We are all, in various ways, trying to keep our tender and budding chests from touching the person in front of us, for fear of the sharp knock of pain that accompanied every touch. The days of hard wrestling were already over, although we were just beginning to realize it. From then on, we would spend our lives as girls trying to maintain that flat, sad distance. Some people moved so far away that we never, ever, saw them again.
***If you have a favorite poem of passage from a book that knocked you breathless, please post about it!
{ 60 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow – this hit a chord with me – bigtime.
Wow… Love it. Looking forward to more.
To poetry!
Here are a few lines so simple that move me, I’m not sure exactly why:
A child’s hand, tiny and warm,
molten, yielding into my own,
letting me choose when to let go.
Sending healing vibes your way…
Love it, Rudri. It makes me so sad when kids grow out of the hand-holding stage. :(
I’m looking forward to reading all your tidbits–and I love Zippy!
I whole-heartedly agree about poetry being everywhere. And my bookshelf sounds as if it resembles yours. A lot. Here’s one of my recent favs:
From Little Bee by Chris Cleave,
“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannt choose where sto strat and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.”
Denise,
I love that. “our stories are the tellers of us.”
I love the idea of finding poetry in prose.
I’ve been reading some Adrienne Rich lately (may she rest in peace) and was reminded of these lines that I love from “Diving into the Wreck”:
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters
xo
Kristen,
I’ve always loved that poem and yet never completely understood it. Which I guess is why so many beloved books/poems of mine leave me wanting more.
From one of my blog posts (http://www.alliwanttosay.com/2010/05/where-did-time-go_25.html), I was lamenting how time keeps ticking away – where did the time go? And my friend responded with: “Is the time really gone? I think you use your time wisely, so I wouldn’t look at it like that.” And that quote has just stuck with me. Stupid to think that this is poetry but it does move me and make me think.
Cathy,
Isn’t it funny how poetry (or the right phrase of prose) knocks us on our ass? I always am thinking about time, about how I don’t how I have enough of it, about how I waste it when I have it, about how I should be spending it, if it’s wrong to just want the day to be over…
OHMIGOSH I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS AND YES ONLY CAPS WILL DO.
I CARRY ZIPPY IN MY CAR, FOR THE PAST EIGHT YEARS.
BECAUSE IT”S MY FAVE BOOK IN THE WORLD AND I DREAM OF ONE DAY PUBLISHING A GIRL NAMED ALEXANDRA.
Have you read “she got up off the couch?” Follow up to Girl Named Zippy?
More Zippy stories, about her life when her mother went to college and she was left home with her dad.
Just as good as the first one.
Alexandra,
I live for Zippy. She rocks my world.
Love this idea; my favorite novels are full of poetry. And I am a greedy quote collector. Here’s one of my favorites, from my all-time favorite writer James Salter. (Glad you’re feeling better!)
“They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. ‘It wouldn’t work. It’s the attraction of opposites,’ he said.
We’re not opposites.’
I don’t mean just you and me. Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they’re ready to leave.”
― James Salter
Katrina,
Ouch. That hits so close to the truth!
Living in New York has meant that Frank O’Hara has eclipsed E.E. Cummings as my favorite poet, if only for this quote:
“However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
“Meditations in an Emergency” is such a fantastic work. It captures so much with such economy.
elizabeth,
You ARE a true New Yorker. In every inch of your heart.
I remember my English teacher in college reading the following poem and being fascinated, disturbed and… I don’t know what. I guess it just haunts me:
I found him sleepy in the heat
And dust of a gopher burrow,
Coiled in loose folds upon silence
In a pit of the noonday hillside.
I saw the wedged bulge
Of the head hard as a fist.
I remembered his delicate ways:
The mouth a cat’s mouth yawning.
I crushed him deep in dust,
And heard the loud seethe of life
In the head beads of the tail
Fade, as wind fades
From the wild grain of the hill.
“Rattlesnake,” by Brewster Ghiselin
Bruce,
wow, that is an eerie one. Maybe it’s a little disturbing at the power the writer got from crushing a life so easily? Wow.
Why not have each one of your loyal readers take turn and “host” their favorite poem every day of the month? I was going to copy and paste “Purple Cow”, but ok, here is one of my favorite love poems: The Taxi by Amy Lowell
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?
*sigh*
I love Kindle partly because I can highlight a passage and have it directly synch online somewhere. I no longer had to stop reading so I could type down the passages, or take a picture of the page, like so: http://instagr.am/p/jMw5K/
Now that I look at the pictures I took of books again, I am not so sure about eBooks any more. I miss paper…
Absence,
That is a genius idea! I’m going to post a proposal about that very thing tomorrow–at least we’ll have half the month left, right?
If you say Poetry, you say Keats:
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —
No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death
I love Keats!
Today is Haiku day which falls during poetry month–makes sense, I guess. So here is a simple offering
Oh to be struck by life so!
Hard…Clean!
…do you get the point?
Hope your poetic self is waxing comfortable!
♥
Katybeth,
I love the last line of that haiku!
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