April Is Poetry Month!
April is National Poetry Month, when poems blossom everywhere like the daffodils, crocuses, and cherry and crabapple blossoms in my backyard. (Click through for great poems about each of those flowers.)
Readers of this newsletter know that we have been hard at work on Celia Bookshop’s initial inventory, which of course includes our poetry section. We’ve gotten help from friends, neighbors, and readers everywhere–thanks to the many of you who have chimed in!–but the most amazing poetry suggestion email came from poet (and Swarthmore College professor emerita) Nathalie Anderson.
I knew Nat by reputation even before I moved to Swarthmore 25 years ago, because she runs the Lit-Philly listserve which many people rely on to know what’s going on in the local literary world. Later, Nat hired me to teach writing at Swarthmore College and became a friend.
As opposed to my more intuitive (scattershot?) way of choosing books, Nat suggested a more organized approach: “My first thought isn’t authors but purposes,” she wrote.
Over the years, Nat has often been asked for poems to be read at weddings or at funerals. Back when I was getting married, I spent long hours looking for poetry for my own wedding—how much time I could have saved if I’d had an anthology then! For funerals, Nat recommends The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, edited by Kevin Young. For weddings, readers might consider Into the Garden, edited by Robert Haas and Stephen Mitchell.
Next, Nat advised, I might consider topics. She recommended, for example, the new nature poetry anthology, You Are Here, by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
Then classic texts, beginning with The Iliad and The Odyssey (but how to choose among the various translations?); big names in poetry (Jericho Brown, Diane Suess, Billy Collins, whoever the current Poet Laureate is); and of course local voices like Dilruba Ahmed, Laynie Browne, Sibelan Forrester, and Betsy Bolton, as well as those with Swarthmore/Philadelphia area connections like Swarthmore College alumna Julia Bouwsma, former Swarthmore resident Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Philly native Major Jackson among many, many (many!) others.
In answer to the question, what five titles would you be particularly glad to see on our poetry shelves, she offered:
Collected or Selected Yeats
Collected or Selected Heaney
Diane Suess’s Frank: Sonnets
Daisy Fried’s The Year the City Emptied
Nzadi Keita Migration Letters
If you want poems to blossom in your email inbox, you can sign up for the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, or Major Jackson’s podcast The Slowdown “for a poem and a moment of reflection in one short episode every weekday,” and doubtless others as well.
Here’s a poem by Nat, from her new collection Rough, shared with permission of the author.
Roots
Aunt Nell surprised even herself
with that rinse tint. Fed to the teeth
with the loose and dingy droops, she
wanted froth, she wanted airy.
Like Miz Belzer, snow-swept, regal.
Like Miz Heyward, cloud-capped and cute.
But first time out, the rinse wronged her,
sallowed, soured: too tentative
a blonding. The sun rising on
twigs shriveled by winter: no leaf
or bloom but maybe a turning:
a baby’s furze, a tallow veil,
a jaundice. She’ll blush to the roots,
the grizzled roots, but it’s not spring.
-Nathalie Anderson
You can browse and shop for many of Nat’s suggestions, plus some of ours, on Celia Bookshop’s April Is Poetry Month list.
We invite you to celebrate Poetry Month by writing a poem of your own!
We asked Swarthmore poet Ruba Ahmed (who runs The Writing Lab “for aspiring and experienced poets”) for a prompt, and she offered this:
If you could revisit a difficult/uncomfortable/annoying childhood experience, what advice or words of comfort would you give yourself, given the wisdom and perspective you've gained over time?
Take inspiration from the poem, “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance,” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Read the poem here.
Listen to it here.
Happy writing!
Because this newsletter has already suggested so many great poetry books to explore, I’ll only offer one recommendation, a children's picture book that is also a poem. As always, I’ll take a look at first lines and ask what that opening might tell us about the pages to come.
Words by Joy Harjo and illustrations by Adriana M. Garcia
That day your spirit came to us rains came in from the Pacific to bless
Clouds peered over the mountains in response to the singing of medicine plants
Who danced back and forth in shawls of mist
Clouds peering over mountains. Plants singing. Rains blessing a newborn. The natural world is profoundly alive in this children’s story, which is also a poem, by former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. The best children’s books always read like poetry to me, even the silly ones (not that this one is silly), because their language is pared down to what’s absolutely essential.
Harjo’s graceful, apparently effortless language makes this a beautiful and delectable book. These opening lines give you a taste of her use of imagery–“shawls of mist”–and of music: savor those sibilant s and bell-like a sounds in the first line.
Later she uses repetition and exhortation, offering the newborn girl blessings and advice–everything from “when you breathe remember the source of the gift of all breathing” to “clean your room.” I predict this book will be a treasure for a new generation of young families.
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