Happy National Poetry Month!

Posted on June 15, 2016 by nobles

April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate we asked English faculty and the library staff to share a poem they love. Check out the poems they chose below, and if you have a poem of your own to share, we’d love to hear about it! English Teacher Kim Libby: Louise Erdrich, “Advice to Myself.” I have this poem posted on the wall of my office at Nobles and at home. I need the advice that Erdrich offers to herself – and to the world. She challenges our definition of what we “need” to get done to get in a day and urges us to pursue the authentic over the mindless and routine.  She writes: don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity.   English Teacher Gia Batty: Mary Oliver, “Why I Wake Early.” Here’s a poem by Mary Oliver that I had taped to my bathroom mirror for a while. I wake up really early to walk my dog and get some work done before school starts, and this poem captures the good part of that. I don’t always greet the sun like this, but I like the idea, at least, of starting the day with “happiness and kindness.” Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and crotchety– best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light– good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.   Library Director Erin Twohig-Canal: e.e. cummings, “spring is like a perhaps hand.” I selected this poem because it’s appropriate for the season and because e. e. cummings’ writing and style gives me something to think about. At first I usually say, “hmm?” but then I reread the lines and like to come up with my own interpretation. Plus, cummings poetry reminds me of my husband – his poetry was the first we read aloud together. A few lines: spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere) arranging a window, into which people look Library Assistant Amy McHugh: Linda Shelburn Reagan, “Forget Me Not.” I read this poem at my mother’s funeral. It’s touching, emotional, loving and so true.  This poem I feel in my heart, and truly believe our loved ones are always with us. Run the last mile with a smile on your face. My arms will be waiting when you finish the race.  Always remember, my love is right there In the beat of your heart, On the wing of your prayer.   English Teacher Alden Mauck: James Dickey, ​”The Shark’s Parlor.” A confession of sorts regarding this poem. I am not from the South, and I hate fishing… but I have loved this poem since I first read it, perhaps because it reads as a great story encased in a poem. It is the tale of a couple of young “good ole boys” who go shark fishing from a Gulfside cottage; the cottage is subsequently wrecked by the shark as it is hauled inside. Here is a quotation:

The shark flopped on the porch, grating with salt-sand driving back in The nails he had pulled out coughing chunks of his formless blood. The screen door banged and tore off he scrambled on his tail slid Curved did a thing from another world and was out of his element and in Our vacation paradise cutting all four legs from under the dinner table With one deep-water move he unwove the rugs in a moment throwing pints Of blood over everything we owned knocked the buckteeth out of my picture His odd head full of crashed jelly-glass splinters and radio tubes thrashing Among the pages of fan magazines all the movie stars drenched in sea-blood Each time we thought he was dead he struggled back and smashed One more thing in all coming back to die three or four more times after death.

And here is James Dickey reading the poem.

English Teacher Martha Donovan: Mary Oliver, “Summer Day.” “Summer Day” is included in the “Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools” project that Billy Collins initiated when he was U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003).  Like many other readers of this poem, I love the final question of the poem: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? I love how “Summer Day” reminds me to “pay attention” to the world before me, to “kneel down in the grass,” to consider what I might do with my “one wild and precious life.” I love that the final question of the poem is worth asking today and yet again some other day. I hold this question close to me.   Librarian Emily Tragert: Pablo Neruda, “Keeping Quiet.” The day after 9/11, someone wrote this poem in chalk on the sidewalk in my neighborhood. It was a beautiful and comforting thing to see and I have loved it ever since. A few lines: If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now I’ll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.   Librarian Talya Sokoll: Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Crazy Woman” I love this poem because, when I read it for the first time as an eighth grader, the speaker’s feelings of being different really resonated with me. I shall not sing a May song. A May song should be gay. I’ll wait until November And sing a song of gray. I’ll wait until November That is the time for me.  I’ll go out in the frosty dark And sing most terribly. And all the little people Will stare at me and say, “That is the Crazy Woman Who would not sing in May.”   English Teacher Charles Danhof: e.e. cummings, “since feeling is first.” I really enjoy the opening line’s assertion that feeling is first; the use of the word “since” shows there is no doubt from the narrator. Moving through the poem with that premise in mind, the theme of love over intelligence becomes reinforced in multiple ways. When the narrator asserts that the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says we are for each other, the flirtatious move has been elevated to a status above the best gesture of the narrator’s brain; a truly sublime experience it must have been to witness that eyelid flutter.