I’ve never been sure what to do with poetry. Even now, typing this in an apartment that my job with Poetry Daily pays for, surrounded by my favorite books, sitting directly across from the small mountain of journal issues and review copies I’ve read through this semester, trying my very hardest to sum up what poetry has done for and to and with me, I find myself thinking, mostly, of all the years I spent without it, living a life that was about as far from poetry as I could have possibly made it.
Unlike many of the poets I know, some of whom have been writing, apparently, since they were small children, I came to the medium late, in my Junior year of college, and did so by accident. In October of 2016, my cousin Matt posted a link, shortly after she died, to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “The Dragon.” I have no idea, really, why I clicked on it. I was newly twenty-one, a barely-passable student, and, if we’re being honest with each other, far more interested in the recreational abuse of prescription medications than I was in anything having to do with “literature.”
But I’ll never forget what it was like reading that poem. It cracked my blood like a glowstick. I was just fascinated: what kind of green imagination could have grown this thing? This garden “full of dark shapes turning”? And could I do it too?
I try not to think very hard about what my life would be like if I hadn’t clicked on that poem. Poetry has—and, somehow, I mean this—given me almost all of the most beautiful moments of my life. Picking up Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night, meaning to just look at a couple poems before bed, and re-reading it until the sun came up. I still remember the first time I cracked open Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular. And I remember, too, reading Tomas Tranströmer’s lines, translated by Robin Fulton, “The October sea glistens coldly / with its dorsal fin of mirages” and feeling like I’d just seen God.
The sub-title of this installment of What Sparks Poetry is “Poems to Read in Community.” The Poetry Daily team convened this semester, inspired by C.D. Wright’s “What Keeps,” to select a group of twenty poems, most from our last year of publication, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, to oneself. In last year’s version of this feature, Kerry Folan said the poems selected were meant to “offer sustenance.” Roque Dalton did say that poetry, like bread, is for everyone. And I still think that holds true.
But I began this essay saying “I’ve never been sure what to do with poetry” because, like many poets working today, I have my own pet skepticisms about what poetry can actually do for those who do and do not live with it. I know how little poetry matters to most of the people I walk past every day. I also know, though, how many people lean on poetry in their most exposed moments—at weddings, in love letters, at funerals. Didn’t Brenda Hillman say “We don’t read recipes at the graves”?
I don’t know what poems can do for the world. But I do know what a poem can do for a reader. And so, as humbly as possible, we offer these to you.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,
We asked the readers from our editorial committee who collaborated with Lloyd Wallace to write a brief statement about what they were looking for as they selected poems from the past year and beyond for this feature. Here’s what they wrote:
Elena Macdonald: I looked for poems that both delight and surprise me; I find hope in the strange and beautiful.
Joey Conley: I picked through poetry looking for fragments of my reflection—to find my ‘strange familiar.’ Poetry offers comfort in words that otherwise tend to fail me.
Taylor Franson-Thiel: I looked for poetry offering hope as a radical response to grief and tragedy.
Grace Baker: I was looking for poetry that welcomed the undercurrent of a held breath.
Isabella Newman: I looked for lines that explored personal sentiments with a refrain of unity.
McKinley Johnson: I looked for poetry that offers readers a reminder of their place within something larger—community, history, the natural world.
Angela Sim: I look for poetry that speaks to places in my heart I often forget about. Poetry that recreates those spaces for me, and reminds me of why I want to live.
Gracie Davidson: I seek poetry that tackles the macro and micro, the collective feelings and experiences we as individuals encounter. Poetry can help us grapple with these moments and offer hope to drive us forward.
Alayda Flick: I looked for poems that explore grief and tragedy with sincerity, not afraid to take up space to honor their loved ones to the greatest degree possible. I find endless sources of insight by watching how creative minds make sense of loss by channeling its ineffableness.
Chelsey Coles: Poems which allowed me not to think too hard—but to be grounded in situations other poets created—kept me grounded, aware, and able to feel and hear shared world experiences.
Faith Baylor: I searched for poetry that gave me pockets of little joy or passionate bursts of purpose – two pillars that keep me heading forward even when it feels impossible.
Betty Walter: I looked for poems that help to create quiet, as quiet gives space to hope.
Austin Lavigne: I wanted poetry that represented all parts of the grief cycle and explored the process of moving forward and living with grief.
