April 2020

Poem-A-Day April 3: Wandering companionless

Hello Friends,

Yesterday’s poem (“So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye) ended with the moon, so I thought I’d keep that theme going just one more day. This is an unfinished fragment by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).

Enjoy.
Ellen

To the Moon

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Percy Bysshe Shelley has been previously featured for Poem-a-Day April 15, 2015 and Poem-a-Day April 22, 2011.

Poem-A-Day April 2: coffee cake and ripe peaches

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

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“So Much Happiness” appears in poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s 1995 collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

Naomi Shihab Nye has been previously featured in these other poem-a-days.

Happy National Poetry Month 2020!

Hello Friends, and Happy National Poetry Month 2020!

As mentioned yesterday, I won’t be able to send a poem every day this month, and they may not have my usual in-depth analysis and commentary and related anecdotes. But I am going to at least get you a few poems!

<3 Ellen

Imaginary Conversation

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

■

“Imaginary Conversation” appears in poet Linda Pastan’s 2015 collection Insomnia.

It’s almost National Poetry Month!

Hello Friends,

March Madness and a whole lot of other things may have been cancelled for this year, but one month that can never be cancelled is National Poetry Month. I happen to think the world needs poetry more than ever right now, I need poetry, and that you might poetry, too.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Muriel Rukeyeser

Unfortunately, I am not in a place to bring you a poem every day this April. But I will be sharing with you when I can.

For those of you who don’t know, I have been running this poem-a-day email list for the past thirteen Aprils (I can’t believe it’s been that long, but it has!). It is usually 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets — but again, this year will not be every day.

No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! I’m not going to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand (hopefully). What will I send you? Well, last April we read couplets, tercets, quatrains, haiku, sonnets, ghazal, spoken word, and trochaic dimeter; poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems from each of the past five decades; poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Native American Poets, Mixed Race poets, and white poets; poems by people of different religions and economic backgrounds; poems by queer poets, straight poets, non-binary poets, men, women, and one six-year-old — just to name a few!

My selections do skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves). This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work — this gives me a freedom other poem-a-day lists do not have to choose whichever poems I want to include, as well as the freedom to include commentary, analysis, personal stories, and other tidbits that I hope make poetry more accessible. I will also frequently refer you to the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the actual creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month, for a more official poem-a-day email list.

Thanks, and Happy (Almost) National Poetry Month!

Love,
Ellen