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Stories We Tell Ourselves

I don’t know anyone who isn’t concerned about the environment these days. The impact of air pollution and climate change can be seen around the globe. As sea levels rise, currents are expected to shift dramatically. From what I understand, there are approximately 1,000 species becoming extinct every day. In her book, Staying with the Trouble(Duke University Press, 2016), theorist Dr. Donna J. Haraway suggests that “staying with the trouble” brought on by climatic and environmental crises can encourage new ways of thinking and new means to sustain us in the future. At the same time, there needs to be a change in the stories we tell ourselves.      

“Everything is held together with stories, that’s all that’s holding us together, stories and compassion,” essayist and fiction writer Barry Lopez once said. Many of these stories influence our actions. The anthropocentric story that humans are the apex of nature, for instance, underlies the idea that we’re entitled to treat the world as an exploitable resource. Yet there are other stories that support sustainability and the interdependence of life. Some of them are ancient, coming from indigenous cultures. Some are new and science-based. We know that organisms in an ecological system depend on each other for their survival, for instance, reinforcing the importance of conservation and species preservation.     

Dr. Suzanne Simard’s recent book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Knopf Doubleday), reports on her lifelong research with trees in the rainforests of British Columbia, demonstrating that forests are “social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities…” Not only are they capable of recognizing other trees around them, they “can remember the past and have agency about the future,” according the publisher’s notes. Simard’s work offers compelling evidence of the interdependence of these noble organisms. More than that, it presents scientific inquiry in a humanistic light, showing that “it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and how old growth trees “nurture the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.” Finding the Mother Tree offers a compassionate model as a way forward, one based on a benevolent relationship with the earth, rather than a commodity to be exploited. As poet Wendell Berry has put it, “The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it — you and every other creature.” 

Eco News

In February, 2021, a snowy owl was spotted in New York City’s Central Park for the first time in over 130 years. Within days it moved on, possibly disturbed by the crowds that came to admire it, or maybe just wanting to return to the Arctic where the majority of the white raptors with black markings make their home

Plans for a controversial oil pipeline project, slated for construction in Memphis, Tennessee, were cancelled in July during the midst of protests and ongoing lawsuits. The proposed 49-mile long pipeline would have carried thousands of gallons of crude oil daily over a protected zone that supplies drinking water to residents of Southwest Memphis, home to several predominately black communities. Led by Memphis Community Against the Pipeline (MCAP) and Protect Our Acquafier, locals rallied to protest the plan they believe would have put neighborhoods such as Boxwood and surrounding homes and businesses at risk, while the Southern Environmental Law Center opposed litigation against long-time residents whose homes stood in the path of the project. The plan, which drew fire nationally, was condemned by former Vice-President Al Gore and others

In Galveston, Texas, volunteers rescued over 2000 green sea turtles that were “cold-stunned” in late February of this year by unseasonably freezing temperatures. Approximately 200 threatened sea turtles from Matagorda Bay and Padre Island were also rescued and taken to the Galveston Laboratory Sea Turtle Hospital for treatment.   

Contests

The 2021 Porad Award, sponsored by Poetry Northwest, is now open. Submit up to five haiku (www.haikunorthwest.org) by September 20th. Named for Francine Porad, the late founder of Haiku Northwest and a former president of the Haiku Society of America, the contest is free this year and will be judged by Susan Antolin, editor of Acorn and author of The Years that Went Missing. Results will be announced on October 30th… The Miller Williams Poetry Prize: submit a full-length collection by September 30th… The Patricia Dobbler Poetry Award: submit two poems up to 75 lines each (for women over forty who haven’t published a full-length book) by 

Putting a Full-length Collection Together: Part 2

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Looking at a variety of poetry collections can be useful when it comes time to assemble your own. Many are thematic like Stag’s Leap, by Sharon Olds, which focuses on the years before and after the poet’s divorce following a thirty-year marriage. Others tell a story, such as Ann Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Illya Kominsky’s Deaf Republic. Less common today are those that concentrate on formal poetic forms, such as Dana Gioia’s 99 Poems: New and Selected. There are countless ways a collection can coalesce, and a strong vision combined with other factors can help to make it shine.

The poetry of Frank O’Hara has a distinctive voice that’s conversational in tone. One of the things that makes his Lunch Poems so effective is that it combines voice with theme. These pieces were written when O’Hara was on lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and have a spur-of-the-moment quality that evokes the pace of city life. Like the poems themselves, the collection comes across as spontaneous with a lively mix of topics and emotional content.  

A distinguishing facet of Lucille Clifton’s poetry is its visual appeal. Reviewer Peggy Rosenthal wrote of Clifton’s work that, “The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, becoming a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.” Visual appeal is closely related to voice, and when these two qualities are combined with strong themes, as they are in Clifton’s Blessing of the Boats, New & Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (winner of the National Book Award), the result can be unforgettable.        

Lyric ordering is another way to enhance cohesion. With this approach, each poem is linked to the previous one in some way, for instance, by imagery or repeated words or phrases. An alternative approach is to place “hinge” poems at the close of each section and the beginning of the next one to guide the reader from one section to the next.

Editing

The conventional wisdom is to begin the editing process after you’ve finished your first draft. But editing a poetry collection is different from editing the draft of a novel, say. I find it to be an ongoing process from start to finish, of writing, revising, and editing. Whatever your method is, when you get to the point that the manuscript feels complete, it’s advisable to let it sit for several days, or even weeks. Then, you’ll be able to give it a final edit with fresh eyes. At that point, it may seem that you’re looking at someone else’s work, a huge advantage because you won’t be blinded by attachment it. 

A final edit can reveal some surprising oversights. It might be a wordy poem that could be tightened up or one that needs to be reformatted, or tweaked. It might be a repeated misspelling or that fact that you used a certain word too many times. (This is where spellcheck and the search function come in handy.) Even if you’ve never been a particularly good judge of your own work, you may find that your editorial eye has become hawk-like, zooming in on a misplaced modifier or a less than effective image. You may also get a sense for what ails the manuscript. Poet and editor April Osserman, who served as Executive Director for Alice James Books, points out that one of the hardest tasks for a poet who’s assembling a collection is to let go of those pieces that aren’t “book strong” or those that “don’t fit the major or minor themes of the book.”  Save those for another project, she recommends in her article, “Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript,” March/April 2011 (www.https:pw.org).  

It’s advisable to look closely at your first and last poems, too. Does the first poem set the right tone? Is it one of your stronger poems? Does the last poem in that section foreshadow the next section? If not, is the transition effective as is? Re-examine key poems and those around them; do they expand on your vision or “talk” to each other? Then read through them sequentially. If there’s a narrative line, does it carry the reader in an engaging way from point A to point B?  Does the last poem in the collection reiterate your vision while adding something new?  Last, if you haven’t been doing this all along, you’ll want to read the poems out loud to yourself. How do they sound? What do you notice about reading them out loud versus reading them silently? What would you change?

Selecting a Title

It’s not absolutely necessary to have a working title, but it can help as a kind of stabilizing force around which the poems revolve. As the project moves along, you may come up with alternative titles, some better, some worse, and the right one may not appear until the last moment. You may hear it from a trusted reader or editor who points out that a little noticed phrase in one of your poems might be the one. Or you might compose a new poem that introduces it. One way or another it will show up.

Some questions to ask when deciding on a title:

  • does it reflect your vision?
  • is it memorable?
  • is it original?
  • does it invite the reader in?
  • does it resonate with the style or voice of the poems? 
  • is it intriguing, or even mysterious?

Sometimes a prospective title just needs a twist, a little something extra to make it stand out. Try switching out a lackluster word or adding a verb to give it action. Rearrange the word order, adding other words to the mix if necessary and see what comes up. Consider making a list of your favorite titles, whether or not they’re poetry collections. Here are a few of my favorites: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, Bright Dead Things, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, Petals of the Moon. Some titles emphasize verbs or verb forms, such as Trainspotting, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, and If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun. At thirteen words, this last one definitely gets my attention.

Putting a Full-length Collection Together: Part 1

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Getting Started

There are a lot of articles out there about how to put a full-length collection of poems together and some of them are of the “ten easy steps” variety. But the truth is, it’s more complicated than that. The process calls on intuition, trial and error, and a good deal of rewriting and editing. A full-length collection can take three years or more of reworking and polishing before it’s ready to be published. Teaming with an experienced editor may speed up the process, but the time it takes to turn a manuscript into a book is valuable, even precious, to a poet’s growth. Why rush it?

Like writing a poem, assembling a collection of poetry is a non-linear process that invites deep immersion. Through close observation you begin to recognize the shape and purpose of the work. You note its weak points and its strengths. You go over it multiple times with various lenses, looking for connections and commonalities. You sink into the mystery of it, not looking for answers necessarily, but alert to questions.

In her article, “How Do You Pick and Arrange the Poems for a Poetry Collection?” poet and blogger Christina M. Ward, author of the collection “organic,” stresses the importance of cohesiveness (www.https:medium.com): “When I say plan a theme, I don’t mean that each poem needs to be about one topic, but the book as a whole needs to have a definable “purpose” or “theme” or “feel,” she says, suggesting that poets think of this as the “vision” of the book. It helps if a book is about something but not every collection needs a specific theme to be cohesive.

Selecting, Sectioning, and Sequencing

Once you’ve identified your vision for the book, you’re ready to begin selecting the poems that are most aligned with that vision. In assembling my second collection, I began by separating poems into two stacks, those that worked or had the potential to work, and those that clearly didn’t. At that point I had about thirty-five poems and knew I needed more. Searching what I laughingly call “my files” — a couple of drawers full of loose papers and others in manila folders — I found a few more possibilities, bringing the total to fifty-one, just enough for a full-length collection. I wasn’t exactly off and running, but there was a glimmer of a hope that I might find a book in there someplace. 

One way to jump-start your collection is to divide the manuscript into sections. This will let you zone in on specific areas and can make it feel more manageable. It also offers visual breaks, along with an opportunity to add section titles and related inscriptions that can help to transition the reader from one thematic focus, or mood, to the next. But like everything else in the process, these details are apt to change. For me, those changes are a sign that I’m beginning to hone in on the finer details. At some point, sections and inscriptions may appear superfluous or even interrupt the flow — if so, it’s okay to let them go. They will have served their purpose like scaffolding on a building site. 

One of the most challenging tasks in putting a collection together is sequencing. Phoebe Stuckes, a former Foyle Young Poet and author of Platinum Blonde (www.https:poetryarchive.org), compares the process to stand-up comedy, in which you “tell your second best joke at the start of your stand-up set and your best joke at the end.”  She suggests printing out your manuscript so you can physically try out various sequences until you find the right one. I’d compare this stage to putting an album of songs together; you want some ballads and some up tempo numbers, some highs and lows, some short numbers and some longer ones. These variations will add texture and interest. Avoiding repetition is key. If you have two poems that are both on the same topic and use much the same vocabulary, you’ll need to rework one or drop it. Feel free to experiment. Playing with different formats such as prose poems and concrete poems can reap unexpected benefits, not only in the way the poems look on the page, but in how they “mean,” and can open the work up in unexpected directions. If you decide later that an experimental poem doesn’t make the grade, you can always pull it.   

Having an accurate table of contents early on is an advantage if you decide to submit the manuscript on the spur of the moment or if you want to share it with a trusted reader for their input. Yes, it’s going to change a lot over the course of the project, but the benefit is that you can scan it from time to time to get a sense of how the “narrative line” is evolving (more on this later). It’s also a good place to enter any notes about what you think might be missing. Do you want a title poem? If so, where do you think it ought to go? Scanning the table of contents will help you decide. Granted, it can be tedious to update page numbers as you shift sections or shuffle poems around, but I’ve found that it’s worth it. This is the uninspiring part of the work, the busy work you might call it, that nevertheless helps to bring a sense of structure to the chaos. (Next time: Looking at structural models and selecting a title.) 

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Books Noted

The Art and Craft of Poetry

In case anybody hasn’t heard, April was National Poetry Month, but any time is a good time to enjoy poetry in its various forms. Here are a few recent offerings:

Three Simple Lines: A Writers Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku, by Natalie Goldberg (New World Library, 176 pages). Natalie Goldberg’s latest offering on the art and practice of writing takes her to Japan where she explores the origins of haiku among the country’s ancient temples and hidden gardens. Classic haiku by masters such as Basho, Buson, Issa, and Chiyo-ni appear in a narrative “as irresistible as a mountain stream…” says author Henry Shukman, “…and come alive in ways that still the mind, expand time, and open the heart.” As insightful as Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Writing the Landscape of Your Mind, this book reminds us of what it means to be open to growth, and how the practice of writing — and haiku, in particular —lends itself to mindfulness.

How to Write a Form Poem, by Tanya Runyon (T.S. Poetry Press). Even poets who primarily write free verse are likely to find this this “how to” book useful. It contains instructions and prompts for writing ten traditional forms, such as sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, haiku, and pantoums. Included are dozens of examples from Runyon and other poets, among them Elizabeth Bishop, Natasha Trethewey, Frank O’Hara, Matsuo Basho, and Wallace Stevens. An author and teacher, Runyon has also written How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem, both of which are geared for use in classrooms. 

Accidental Gardens, by Rob Carney (Stormbird Press). This is Carney’s take on the contemplative Japanese form of haibun. First used by Basho in the 17th century, the term refers to a hybrid genre that combines haiku with prose — typically, observations such as travel logs, and sketches of people, activities, or landscapes. Basho’s Okku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior) is probably the most well-known example of the form. Comprised of four sections — 42 haibun in all — each of the short ruminations in Accidental Gardens ends with a brief poem or compelling image. Focusing on the natural world and our reckless disregard for the environment, the collection reads as “a journey through the absurdity, tragedy, and black comedy of late-stage capitalist and consumerist America,” writes author Nick Hunt. A professor of English at Utah Valley University, Carney has published seven other poetry collections.  

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Books Noted:

Black Girl, Call Home, by Jasmine Mans, is one of the most anticipated books of 2021, according O, the Oprah Magazine, and is “arresting as only spoken word artistry can be.” The publisher (Berkley Books) describes it as a “literary coming of age narrative” and “a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood.” It features many of Mans’ viral YouTube poems in print for the first time, as well as active phone numbers that readers can dial to hear her perform “bonus poems.” Poet Danez Smith has written that “Mans takes up the tools of Brooks (Gwendolyn) and Sanchez (Sonia) into her good hands and chisels us an urgent and grand work, proving why she’s the favorite of all the girls in the back of the bus.” Raised in Newark, New Jersey, Mans graduated from The University of Wisconsin Madison with a B.A. in African American Studies and currently serves as resident poet of the Newark Public Library. 

Spencer Reece, who struggled with rejection for years before his first collection, The Clerk’s Tale,was published to acclaim in 2004, now has a memoir out, The Secret Gospel of Mark: a Poet’s Memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2021). Poetry and faith are intimately linked in this saga that chronicles his battle with alcoholism, his orientation as a gay man, and his calling to the Episcopal priesthood. Chapters explore the work of mentor-poets who inspired him along the way, from Emily Dickenson and George Herbert, to Elizabeth Bishop and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others. National Book Award-winning author Andrew Solomon writes that Reece “brings into sharp focus a life of authentic despair and ultimate redemption…it is a tender but unforgiving, clear-sighted exposition of Christian faith.” Poet Carolyn Forche’, Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University, calls it “A profound and necessary work, luminous and full of grace.”

Love Unknown: the Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop, by Thomas Travasino, isn’t new — it came out in 2019 — but it’s notable for the comprehensive account it offers of this “poet’s poet.” Bishop published sparingly, but she won both the Pulitzer Prize (for Poems: North & South/A Cold Springin 1955) and the National Book Award (for her Complete Poems in 1970). Her poetry is “marked by precise description of the physical world” — much of it inspired by her extensive travels — while “her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing,” according to the Poetry Foundation. Her style is characterized by structured rhyme and a syntax that often reads more as prose than as formal verse. A selection of her work, including “The Armadillo,” can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org.

In The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, author Christof Koch defines consciousness as subjective experience, “no matter how banal or exalted.”  It’s “the feeling of being alive,” he says, and speculates that it’s present in even the simplest life forms. A leader in the field of consciousness science, Koch asks the question, “How is it that a physical organ like the brain can give rise to feelings?” Arguing for a quantitative theory, he notes that science can now “detect and track the footsteps that any conscious experience leaves in the brain.” He doesn’t believe, however, that computers will ever feel. “Consciousness is not a clever hack. Experience does not arise out of computation,” he says. Nature has called his work “Invigorating…Koch tracks the ‘neural footprints’ of experience, swims off the wider shores of integrated information theory, and speculates about the ‘feeling of life itself’ in ravens, bees and octopuses —along with related ethical concerns.” (The MIT Press, 2019) 

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A Man of Many Hats: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

Poet, painter, publisher, and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti died at his home in San Francisco on February 22rd, aged 101, with family by his side. One of the main figures of the “Beat Generation,” the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore in the city’s North Beach neighborhood was an award-winning poet who also published many of his peers, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel, and Bob Kaufman, among others. But he’s also recognized for his historic commitment to freedom of expression. After launching Ginsberg’s expletive-peppered poem, “Howl” in a book of the same title in the late 1950s, he was arrested by the S.F.P.D. on obscenity charges, making the book an instant cause celebre’. The resulting trial acquitted Ferlinghetti of all charges, with the judge declaring that the work had “redeeming social importance,” a decision that facilitated the distribution of other controversial titles.

For a lot of us who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, Ferlinghetti was a cultural icon, and City Lights was more than just a book store — it was a sanctuary, a place where you could find classic literature in paperback at affordable prices, shelves full of obscure literary magazines, and tabloids of various political stripes. I remember my first visit there was on a trip with some of my high school friends — this must have been in 1963 or 64. The poet Michael Palmer was standing outside the entrance on Columbus Avenue, dressed and made-up convincingly as Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp”, tipping his bowler hat and greeting one and all. He explained the connection for me — Chaplin’s film, City Lights, was the inspiration for the name of the store. Those were the days when you could hang out in the basement at one of the little round tables, thumbing through the latest edition of the Pocket Poet’s Series (Ginsberg’s Howl was the fourth in that series), when you could get a steaming bowl of minestrone soup with parmesan cheese on top and a slice of sourdough bread for a dollar at Mike’s Pool Hall across the street. Mike’s is long gone, but City Lights is still hanging in there, even during these challenging times, thanks to a GoFund Me campaign last year that raised $400,000 in just four days.

Ferlinghetti was a familiar sight around North Beach in those early years, sporting one of his many hats and riding his bike around the neighborhood. He didn’t regard himself as a “Beat” poet, but as one of “the last of the bohemians,” cultivating an appreciation for jazz and the visual arts, as well as letters. (He wrote his M.A. thesis on the painter, Turner, and recorded many of his first poems to jazz accompaniment.) The author of more than 30 books, including the bestselling volumes, Pictures of the Gone World, A Coney Island of the Mind, and, most recently, a novel, Little Boy, he served as the city’s first Poet Laureate in 1998. Among his many awards are the Robert Frost Memorial Medal from the Poetry Society of America and the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, the quirky building that houses City Lights Bookstore was granted landmark status and in 2019, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, March 24th was declared Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day by the City of San Francisco.

Writing in the Paris Review, John Freeman described his work as Whitmanesque, with a “long, prosey line, but his I is softer, stranger, and less verbose…” as it steps “…across the pages with sudden, perfectly timed enjambments…” Some of his other influences were Thomas Merton, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. Yet, in the end, the voice and the vision were unmistakably his own. An unapologetic lover of life and its many pleasures, he celebrated the joys and beauty of the world in his life and art, but he also took a stand against the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the moral turpitude of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, and many other issues of the day. 

I’m sure there will be countless heart-felt tributes to him in the weeks ahead, and more studies, too, that recognize his extraordinary contribution. Poet Tess Taylor, for CNN, has written a tribute that reads as part poem, part prayer (“Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the Hive and the Honey,” 2/24/21). It’s full of sweet reminiscence and gratitude for what he gave to the community he lived in for over sixty years, but I’ll quote just the last three lines here: “Hail and farewell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. May you rest under the good oaks. May you find someplace wonderful to sit in your hat, and may you speak long and well with the bards in the beyond.” Long-time employee Elaine Katzenberger, who now serves as director of book store, said that “I feel very grateful that I got to see him during the virus, and I’m glad that he lasted this long. I wish he was still here.” Reverend Mark Stanger, an Episcopalian priest and teacher at the Cathedral School for Boys, said that, “His words were a great friend to me.”

On Tuesday evening, February 23rd, an impromptu vigil took place in Jack Kerouac Alley between Vesuvio’s Cafe and the store. Poets Jack Hirschman, Deborah Drozd, Scott Bird and several dozen other mourners gathered to read from his poetry and to share memories and toasts. Inside, “a shrine was placed in the upstairs poetry room,” according to Sam Whiting and Nora Mishanec, writing in the S. F. Chronicle. “His trademark black bowler, frayed at the brim, sat next to some vintage photos and a basket of free postcards with his poem, ‘The Golden Gate,’ on the front.” Ferlinghetti is survived by a son, Lorenzo, a daughter, Julie, and three grandchildren. No public memorial has been scheduled due to the pandemic.      

Tongo Eisen-Martin Appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco

“Poetry is really the opportunity to see what your mind has to communicate or how it wants to communicate when not tasked with some kind of social reproduction or some kind of survival…it’s just you and your thoughts,” Tongo Eisen-Martin said recently after his appointment as the eighth Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Raised in the city’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, he was nominated by a nine-member panel and appointed by Mayor Breed during Black History Month in February. Asked by KRON what his vision is for the role, he said: “It’s a pretty simple equation, it’s just workshops with people, providing open mikes, providing publications…the aim is to move poetry more into the trenches of the city where it belongs.” An educator and Columbia graduate, Eisen-Martin has taught in prisons and youth homeless shelters, “even youth group psych wards, everywhere our conditions are most wretched,” he told PBS New Hour last year. He’s also the founder of Black Freighter Press and the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which received the 2018 American Book Award and the California Book Award for Poetry (Pocket Poet’s Series, City Lights Publishers).

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Looking at “Halley’s Comet”  

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at Stanley Kunitz’s poem, “Halley’s Comet.” It’s one of my favorites — the work of a poet at the peak of his powers — and it’s still fresh and relevant over twenty-five years after it was written. It covers feelings many of us are experiencing today in varying degrees — fear of death, fear of the unknown, and a sense of loss — subjects that, at first glance, some readers may want to turn away from. Yet Kunitz tackles them with skill and insight, and even humor. Besides offering solace during difficult times, poetry can provide an alternative lens for viewing ourselves and the world — in this case, a telescope. If you were born after 1985 (when it last appeared) you may not have heard of Halley’s Comet, but every seventy-six years it swoops visibly near the planet earth, and when it does it arouses both fear and awe. Kunitz’s poem shares the impact of this event on the poet as a child — he was just five years old when the comet passed by in 1910. Late in life, he commented that, “I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” I think he achieved that here. (Spoiler alert: you can hear this poem at www.poetryarchive.org.)

The first sentence glimmers with the qualities that make it so poignant in its entirety — a sense of immediacy, of place, of intimacy, and wonder — transporting us into another time, and into the heart and mind of the young protagonist. In that brief introduction, we learn that Kunitz  is in the first grade and that his teacher, Miss Murphy, has written the words “Halley’s Comet” across the blackboard with the advisory that if the comet “wandered off course/ and smashed into earth/ there’d be no school tomorrow.” The fear of disaster and the promise of “no school” is a heady mixture for a child, and I wonder how kids today might relate to this poem since their own schooling has been interrupted due to the pandemic.   

The second sentence develops the theme of fear in the description of an itinerant “preacher from the hills with a wild look in his eyes” and his warnings to “repent,” a familiar scenario today, as well. The fourth sentence offers details of the young poet’s home life with the observation that “At supper I felt sad to think/ that it was probably/ the last meal I’d share/ with my mother and my sisters.” The directness of this statement is in keeping with a child’s perspective, revealing the depth of his of anxiety. In the sixth sentence, Kunitz changes the tense from past to present, depicting his younger self sneaking into the hall after the others have fallen asleep, and climbing “the ladder to the fresh night air.” The effect of this subtle change takes us out of the realm of reflection and closer to the moment.

The concluding eighth and ninth sentences confirm an absent father, establishing longing in contrast to the vastness of the universe as seen from the rooftop “of the red brick building/ at the foot of Green Street.” It’s there a boy in a “white flannel gown” on a gravel bed searches “the starry sky/ waiting for the world to end.” Although it’s emotionally resonant, there’s only one word in this poem that describes a specific emotion. Yet the accumulation of details evokes a felt sense of commonality and something we don’t usually associate with childhood — existential awareness. This quality can be found in other examples of the poet’s work, too, and it’s no doubt been observed that some of them represent a kind of dialogue with the father he never knew.

Poetry can help to connect us to each other but it can also connect us to parts of ourselves we may have lost touch with. Kunitz was approaching 90 years of age when he wrote this poem, and by looking back to the events surrounding the comet’s arrival, he was able to reconnect to the boy he once was. As a student of Jung, he would have recognized this archetype as the “wounded child.” For younger readers, the image of a child alone under a starry sky will have other implications. One of them may be that loneliness is relative. In the poem, we see that the young Kunitz isn’t exactly alone; his mother and sisters are in the apartment, below, and there’s an entire town that surrounds the building on Green Street — asleep for the moment, but still there. And there’s the sky itself, boundless, darkly glimmering, containing everything. (The Collected Poems, S. Kunitz, W.W. Norton, 2000).

Connecting with Poetry

Political turmoil and uncertainty about the pandemic have left people feeling stressed-out and anxious about the future. Author and educator Diana Raab believes that poetry can help. “Reading and writing poetry encourages a certain interconnectedness and helps establish a sense of community between oneself and others,” she says (“How Poetry Can Heal,” Psychology Today, posted April 11, 2019). That interconnection is vital to mental health, and can help to overcome feelings of isolation. “It can also be a form of meditation because it encourages a sense of mindfulness and the ability to tap into what we’re feeling, seeing, and experiencing at the moment of writing,” she says. Poet Tess Taylor suggests much the same, and believes that reading poetry can help us to reconnect and recharge. The author of “Rift Zone” told PBS recently that “sharing breath with people outside our family is a big no-no these days. And, as a result, a lot of us are lonely” (March 2, 2021). She recommends “spending some time each day with a poem” as a way to connect with its cadence and syncopation, and to experience the story the poet is telling. Doing so, “you become the poem’s instrument. You share its breath,” she says. “In a time when we’re cut off from other people, poems allow us this conversational intimacy…” and “we can feel larger, more awake, more social, more whole.”  

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Amanda Gorman Shines as the Sixth, and Youngest, U.S. Inaugural Poet 

During the inaugural ceremony in Washington D.C. last month, twenty-two year old Amanda Gorman delivered her poem “The Hill We Climb” just days after the deadly insurrection there. Describing herself as “a skinny black girl, descended from slaves, and raised by a single mother,” her poem aspires to “envision a way in which our country can still come together and still heal,” she said in an article by Alexandra Alter in the New York Times. Gorman, a recent Harvard graduate, was raised in Los Angeles where she sang in the youth choir and recited her poetry at St. Brigid Catholic Church in South Central L.A. “Í think a lot of times in cultures we think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with water. I think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with words, meaning that the poem was an opportunity to kind of resanctify, repurify, and reclaim, not just the Capitol Building, but American democracy and what it stands for,” she told Trevor Noah of the Daily Show. Inspiring and polished, Gorman’s performance was just about as good as it gets, at any age.

The focus on healing is shared by Richard Blanco, an openly gay Latino, who read his poem “One Today” at President Barack Obama’s second inaugural in 2013. Speaking to NBC’s Sandra Tulley, he suggested that “Poetry uses language to make us feel and think in new ways. That’s how it can help heal us — by asking questions we aren’t asking of ourselves and others, and by changing the conversation, the rhetoric, the discourse, so that we can see beyond the abstract language of sociopolitical jargon and arrive at greater truths,” said Blanco, who aims to “build bridges of empathy” with his poetry.

Maya Angelou was already a best-selling author with her candid memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” when she served as inaugural poet at the swearing in of President Bill Clinton in 1993.  Her recitation of “On the Pulse of Morning,” with its themes of inclusion and responsibility, was stirringly theatrical, calling on her training as an actor and speaker, and echoing the oral tradition of African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas. At least one critic has suggested that Angelou’s greatness is attributable to that poem, but her enduring message may be in her life as much as in those words, in her role as a black woman writer, teacher, activist, and humanitarian.

The tradition of the inaugural poem is relatively recent in U.S. history. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy was the first of four presidents to select a poet to compose and read an original poem for the inauguration. His choice of Robert Frost resulted in one of the most memorable images from that time. Standing at the podium, sunlight reflecting off his untamed white hair and the snow on the ground, Frost recited his poem, “The Gift Outright” — completely from memory. But that wasn’t the poem he’d planned on delivering. Glare from the snow prevented him from reading his original text, “Dedication, For John Kennedy His Inauguration,” composed for the occasion. Both works can be found in “The Poetry of Robert Frost” (Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1969). More recently, Miller Williams and Elizabeth Alexander have also served with distinction as inaugural poets for the second terms of Clinton and Obama. For more on this, see “Inaugural Poems in History,” www.poets.org.