Apr 14, 2022

Thanks for reading Monday’s post! If you missed it, check it out here.

If you live nearby (or maybe even if you don’t), you might hear a strange whistling noise today. That’s the sound of my epic end-of-the-semester sigh. As you all know, this semester was a hard one. There is no break that will ever feel long enough to recover from the last two years, but now until August is a start.

I wrote on Monday about visiting my alma mater and one of the things I did there was go to a poetry reading. Thomas Richardson and Catherine Pierce read and their poems were lovely. One of the questions they got asked after was how they would explain the moment poetry appears to be having.

white and purple flower on white box — Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

They talked about social media and Amanda Gorman’s performance at the presidential inauguration. I have no doubt those are important. I also heard Mary Oliver interviewed on a podcast recently and she talked about the similarity between poetry and prayer. Both short. Both lyrical. Both calls to something beyond ourselves. There are so many places where prayer and poetry are indistinguishable—the Psalms, Rumi, or Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditations.

I have been writing poems all my life. The first I can remember was for my third grade teacher, Mrs. Hendrickson. It was about flowers. In college, I wrote sonnets in iambic pentameter, as well as several penis limericks (don’t ask, though, yes, I still remember at least one). I wrote poems for the people I love—one about my dad as the Grinch that became part of our Christmas decorations. There are about half a dozen poems I’ve memorized over the course of my life that I can still mostly recite.

I have a long relationship to poetry, but it was only during the pandemic I found myself going back to reading poetry. Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Ross Gay. I had a poem every morning with breakfast, a habit I’ve picked back up again in the last few weeks.

I find myself hungry for poetry. I’m not sure exactly why. It feels healing and we all need some healing now.

Poems are like prayers, but also like songs. They’re communal. The poet writes them alone, but then they’re performed or read in an unending chain. They are like the light touch of another human hand, making the darkness flare for a moment with light.

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