As many of you know, April 1st kicked off National Poetry month. Well, WAB wouldn’t really be WAB if we didn’t celebrate somehow. So, tune in periodically for some staff picks of our favorite poems. We will have several installments this month and we promise you won’t be disappointed.
Also, we don’t claim to know all the best poems! We would love to hear some of your favorites. So, please feel free to send in a lymric, an ode, a sonnet, some free verse … (you get the idea). You don’t need to tell us why you love the verse so much, but any explanation may satisfy our curiosity.
Please email Rylie Day at rylied@wab.org. If there are enough responses, we will post a cumulative blog at the end of the month!
Happy reading! (Please note we have provided links to credited websites.)
Why Poetry Can Be Hard For Most People
by: Dorothea Lasky
Because speaking to the dead is not something you want to do
When you have other things to do in your day
Like take out the trash or use the vacuum
In the edge between the stove and cupboard
Because the rat is everywhere
Crawling around
Or more so walking
And it doesn’t even notice you
It has its own intentions
And is searching for that perfect bag of potato chips like you once were
Because life is no more important than eating
Or fucking
Or talking someone into fucking
Or talking someone into something
Or sleeping calmly and soundly
And all you can hope for are the people who put that calm in you
Or let you go into it with dignity
Because poetry reminds you
That there is no dignity
In living
You just muddle through and for what
Jack Jack you wrote to him
You wrote to all of us
I wasn’t even born
You wrote to me
A ball of red and green shifting sparks
In my parents’ eye
You wrote to me and I just listened
I listened I listened I tell you
And I came back
No
Poetry is hard for most people
Because of sound
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23690
since feeling is first
By: e e cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the worldmy blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2006/06/04
On Turning Ten
by: Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that it is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk thought the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
One Art
by: Elizabeth Bishop
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996