Poetry

Because we need it right now, because we need it always

• You might’ve missed this recent post: “The last weeks of the last school year ever”. A peek beyond the paywall:

The truth being that kids are a very particular form of chaos. The truth being that I don’t love all kids, only a select few who prove themselves, and only my own two unconditionally. And the truth being that I believe I am a pretty great parent to tweens and teens — something I would’ve never guessed — and a less-than-patient, less than skillful mother to infants and toddlers. Hey man, that’s life. Men get to not like kids in general and don’t have to sacrifice everything or become completely different people when they’re fathers if you haven’t noticed.

• Not only did I love this list by

jenn romolini

and the fact that BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY appears on it, but it turns out that the part of my book that she loved (about first falling in love with the person you end up marrying and those unblemished early perfect days) is exactly what I loved about her book. Life is funny!
• Related: Everything Is Fine is doing another live event in NYC! I’ll be there! Thankfully not as a guest talking about my sex life this time! I’m so excited to get to NYC for a quick hop and this event was so super fun last time, get your tickets here.

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Poetry

The other afternoon I returned from walking my dog Edie in a loop around our neighborhood. She knows that winter is over and that means there are no excuses left for what I call “a corner walk” which means an eighth of the way around the loop, long enough for her to take care of you know and for me, for us, to head straight back home. Now this process apparently requires a full loop walk and while I appreciate her advocacy on behalf of my physical activity, I return home feeling both better and worse. Better for the walk of course, but worse from the heat.

New England summer heat, the humidity mostly, turns me into a real bitch, a total crab. I hear you wondering “turns?!” and yet I will ignore it. Anyway, I lose my ability to self-regulate at any temperature roughly above 78.

When I’m here alone I’ll return from these walks and immediately strip off my clothes in an attempt to get my personality back. But when my kids are here I have to find less traumatizing ways to cool off. It’s while I was chugging a glass of ice water in front of the fridge that I re-read the poems I had taped there months ago. I have loved them for years and they remained in that middle space (I refuse to say liminal, I swear to god don’t make me say fucking liminal) where they lived in piles of loved things that have no destination.

What I’ve relearned over this past year is tape is for the temporary, for the nomadic, for the loved things that only need a home for right now. So up they went on the fridge.

That afternoon as I slugged back that ice water, I realized this is the time of year when I had originally come across both poems, this time of being released into summer break and big transitions. This is exactly the time when each poem made me pause, remember, and read them again. I needed the pause that these poems provided then and I needed that even more now.

It’s fitting that the corners of these two poems keep peeling up, the humidity of summer undermining the tape. The summer already trying to set them free. Anyway, I think you might like these poems too.

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First-Year Teacher to His Students
by Gary J. Whitehead

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Full-Time Driver
by Marcus Jackson

Connecting (and reconnecting) with these poems reminded me of an excellent episode of Vibe Check. Remember Must See TV? Since this podcast launched it’s been my Must Listen every week. It’s never not made me think (or rethink) about what is happening right now in this world of ours. It has never not made me laugh or slap my hand over my mouth and scream OH MY GOD. And it’s also provided incredible and varied recos (not just the latest this-or-that). I’m currently reading POVERTY BY AMERICA by Matthew Desmond thanks to this great book club episode with the author.

But the episode I’ll direct you to now features Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. It made me completely rethink my relationship to poetry. I’ve often felt either too stupid or entirely too impatient to “get” poetry. If you feel similarly, I urge you to listen to this episode. This quote of hers, about being open and playing and not having to like every poem, is just perfect:

“I think of poetry very much like music. You don’t listen to one song and if you don’t like it, decide you hate music.”

This also brings me to THE BIRD IS GONE by Darren Higgins.

I’ve known Darren for a long time now. We used to work together then we wrote alongside each other on annual writing retreats with two other friends where we did precious little talking about writing on our off-hours (the only writing retreat I can handle). He’s one of only two people who came into my office and hugged me when I lost my job fifteen years ago, a gesture I will never forget.

Anyway, I’m continuously amazed by his brain and creativity, not just because he gets hilariously exasperated by my half-assed grasp on the rules of grammar and punctuation, but because of his continuous push to write poetry and create visual art for the simple act of doing both. Even as he raises his boys and works full-time and fights through this life like the rest of us, even when it feels impossible. An abbreviated description of his latest chapbook:

“Once there were billions of passenger pigeons. Massive roiling flocks swept across North America like a storm, billions of pigeons, so many that they darkened the sky, passing in a roar, so many that branches cracked and crashed beneath them wherever they came to rest, so many that their excrement would lay a foot deep by the time they moved on. Their abundance was indescribable, almost mythical, their numbers seemingly inexhaustible. And yet, by 1914 there was only one passenger pigeon left. Martha, old and unwell, sat alone in her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo—and when she died on September 1 of that year, there were none.

What happened? Overhunting, railroads, telegraph lines, development, the pigeons in their billions didn’t stand a chance.

But what did it feel like, being alive then, looking up in panic at the sky, the sun gone black? The poems in The Bird Is Gone drop readers into the storm, the awe and fear, the greed, the waste, the odd lingering quiet after a hunt.”

You can buy THE BIRD IS GONE here (it’s just $10!) and you can read one of the poems here.

Hey, happy summer. Let’s make it a good one.

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