Tag: poetry

Mary Oliver

1 Comment

Yesterday we learned of the death of Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets. I enjoyed seeing her work filling my Twitter feed, including poems I’d never read and many familiar verses.

I can’t articulate well why Mary Oliver was one of my favorite poets. I read her poetry collections slowly, alone, with a pencil to underline beautiful lines, but I inevitably failed to use it because each line is so visceral and enrapturing. Mary Oliver came with honesty in her hands and I floated in her words, comforted. And now she is resting. I pray it is peaceful.

In an earlier version of this post, I quoted six of my favorite Mary Oliver poems. However, a friend rightly point out that Mary Oliver’s works are all under copyright. I don’t want to keep anyone from paying for her art by supplying her words here, so I’ve replaced the poems with links to some of my favorite collections of her works. If you haven’t invested in one of her collections, or if (like me) you’re wanting to get another one, I heartily recommend these three.

–A Thousand Mornings
–Dog Songs
–Owls and Other Fantasies

Poetry is Saving My Life

3 Comments

Last Wednesday, I read Liz Deere’s exceptional blog post, “Life Savers.” In it, she explains the origins behind a question I’ve heard asked, and liked, for a while now: What is saving your life? I encourage you to go read the post, and the rest of Liz’s work. For Liz, meeting around the table with friends was saving her life. Poetry was saving mine.

Tyler had had a long, rough day. I lay down on the couch with him for a while, until he was soothed and asleep, then slipped away and fetched the book I’d started several days earlier: Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming. I bought the book years and years ago. I’ve even given it to others, on all the highest recommendations, without having read it.

At the moment, I’m galloping through my existing library, trying books I’ve had for years, giving them just 20 minutes to capture me or they go in the “to give away” pile. Even books I finish and thoroughly enjoy, I often put into the “to give away” pile. I don’t need them taking up space on my shelves or in the future’s moving truck unless I intend to treasure them for years. And a great many books, though I enjoy them, are not that way. Many were, but I no longer need them as I once did. I want them to go to people who need their stories, who will read and love them as they were meant to be read and loved.

Several nights before as I prepared to take a long, hot bath, I picked Brown Girl Dreaming because it is a memoir in verse and I expected it wouldn’t take me long to finish. I felt almost manic that night, wanting to get things done, get things through, to add to my piles and give one pile away. But I couldn’t go to sleep that way.

One of the many wonders of poetry is that it doesn’t care about your desired pace. In poems, time and rhythm and pacing and focus exists differently, uniquely, almost-but-not-quite rigidly.

Reading a book of poetry, whether done over years or a few hours, is like slipping your head under the meniscus of the ocean. You can surface after each poem or stay under and explore the depths until your lungs burn and your legs feel leaden. But for every moment you are reading, your body moves with foreign resistance and unearned grace. The currents determine how quickly and how well and they are not yours. They don’t listen to you. Someone else has already decided how this will flow. The experience can leave one gasping and disoriented or invigorated and refreshed. I have enough experience with poetry, like swimming, that I’m usually of the latter. Even so, I can put my head up and find the landscape completely changed from what I remember.

When I finished the last poem in Woodson’s collection, I wrote “Mom” on a blue post it and stuck it to the front cover. Then I curled up next to Tyler and let my mind float again through the words and phrases, images and sounds I’d gathered while swimming. And it sustained me long past when he woke.

The following morning I encountered a photo of Mary Karr’s poem, “VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God” from her new collection, Tropic of Squalor. “Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you,” the poem begins, “could be cured with a hot bath”.

Yes, I thought. Brown Girl Dreaming.

A story also surfaced, one I heard Mary Karr tell at a lecture at Georgia Southern when I was still an undergrad there. When Karr was an alcoholic, and when she and her husband were divorcing, she would hear a voice that tried to take care of her. It said things like, “You should make a sandwich.” And when she’d keep listening, it said, “You haven’t eaten all day. You should make a sandwich.” That voice was so kind, so wise, so invested in her well-being that she appreciated it and gradually learned to listen to it. That voice, she told us, she eventually understood as the voice of God.

“VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God” she’d titled the poem. “Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath…”. And at the end, ”Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.”

The ocean of poetry is as much a gift from God as the air around us, the sandwich that will sustain us. And poetry is saving my life this week.

Poems:
“I Wash the Shirt” by Anna Swir
“Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
“Bareback Pantoum” by Cecilia Woloch
“This Happened” by C. K. Williams
“Apostrophe to the Apostrophe” by Eric Nelson

Novels and Collections:
Brown Girl Dreaming Jacqueline Woodson
The Crossover by Kwame Alexander
Teratology by Susannah Nevison
A Book of Luminous Things edited by Czeslaw Miłosz
On Paying Attention by James A. Autry

Spring Reading Recap

4 Comments

Hello dear readers,

Work is really busy, personal life is really busy, and I’m physically tired and emotionally drained. So this week, I’m going to tell you about some of the best books I’ve read this spring.

I’m trying to stress read instead of stress eat, which has significantly contributed to my reading 19 books so far this year. I’ve found that mysteries are most effective at giving my brain a break from wedding details, interpersonal concerns, work problems, and everything else I’m stressed about these days. I keep a book in progress on my phone, on audiobook for my various commutes, and a paperback in my purse. If I get to Tyler’s ten minutes before he does: paperback. If I have to drive downtown for another vendor meeting: audiobook. If Word crashes my work computer for the third time in an hour and has to be rebooted again: eBook.

–The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
–The Sound of Glass by Karen White

Perveen Mistry of The Widows of Malabar Hill, set in 1920s Bombay, is my favorite new heroine. I’d preorder the sequel right now if possible. The Sound of Glass was actually a gift to my mom for her birthday, since she’s long preferred mysteries and this one is set in our hometown. She loved it so much, she sent it back with me to read, too, and now I have two more White mysteries waiting on my shelf.

–Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
–Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Prior to a failed attempt last November to draft a mystery, I hadn’t read much in this genre. I’d only read two Christie novels before, both in the past two years, and have been wanting to work through her best known and best loved books. I haven’t even seen the TV shows or movie adaptations, so it’s all gloriously new territory for me. In particular, I like to listen to Christie’s works on audiobook so I get to hear the great accents. Murder at the Vicarage is my first with Miss Marple. Death on the Nile is my second with Poirot.

–An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole
–If the Dress Fits by Carla de Guzman

One of my favorite genres has long been romance. The structure of romance books are familiar and predictable (which is not to say that the stories are). I like seeing how characters are transformed for the better by loving someone else. Alyssa Cole is hardly a new author, but she is to me. I’ve had this book, about a Union spy during the Civil War, since it came out last year and am kicking myself for waiting so long to read it. I bought If the Dress Fits on eBook after I saw that I’d missed a big read-along and discussion of it through WOC in Romance. I could tell from everyone’s reactions that I would adore its sweetness and its heroine, and boy-howdy have I.

–The Rain in Portugal by Billy Collins
–The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace

When I can’t write prose, I write poetry. When I can’t read novels, I read poetry. When prose weighs me down, poetry is also a good palate cleanser. I’ve had Lovelace’s first collection for ages, widely touted on the bookish circles I run in on Twitter. I bought The Rain in Portugal on a whim during a recent Barnes & Noble trip. Billy Collins is critically touted and widely published, but I discovered him when I noticed the cover and opened to a poem that spoke to me in a familiar way. Lovelace’s follow-up collection, The Witch Doesn’t Burn in this One, is already on my shelf.