I love the Neil Diamond verse, “when you take the blues and make a song, you sing ’em out again.” This being National Poetry Month, I think it’s a good time to remember to try to express life as art. I’ve been so busy that I haven’t written any poetry recently. As a result, I don’t miss my own poems so much as I miss the way I paid attention to and understood the world. Thinking like a poet makes me think of connections, the way things are interrelated. For instance, figurative language is all about connections: metaphors and similes connect things denotatively and connotatively. Thinking like a poet, for me, was fulfilling and comforting. I never do make new years resolutions, but I’m willing to make a National Poetry Month resolution to think like a poet. Good luck to those of you writing a poem a day and celebrating this month in other ways. May you sing out your blues so they’re shared, so we’re all a bit stronger. We have a number of poets this month who have revivified their experiences and now share those with us as art. Associate Editor Julie Brooks Barbour brings us a wonderful poem by poet Ellen McGrath Smith. Of this work, Ms Julie writes:
I love the way this poem works like a camera: putting the reader at a distance from the mother, then bringing her close, then back out and in again in strange, fascinating ways. The mother is larger than life, the eye of the world. Then she is made human by a bruise or another vulnerable moment. Ellen McGrath Smith gives us more than just a mother at the Alamo—she gives us the vision of a whole mother by using many different angles.
We have two lovely poems by Gary Beck to share with you this month. These poems touch on some of our most basic drives: to create, to be understood, to be remembered, and to find solace. The simplicity of these poems is lovely, but the depth of thought they’ll lead you to is where the true gift of these poems lies.
It is the terribleness of the events in “A Little Known Fact” that continue to draw me to this fascinating poem by David James. In this poem, two beings die together, one forced to be there for the ease of the other’s passage. It seems to me that, if you’re paying attention, life and death necessarily involve some horror. Here, that horror arises out of the sacrifices we demand for our own comfort. Horror isn’t always a bad thing, of course; it can also help us maintain balance in our lives as we try to minimize the pain in the world. In other words, this powerful poem made me think and made my heart squeeze.
We also have a beautiful poem by Matthew Nadelson. His poem “To My Father on the Death of His Father” is touching. It is accompanied by a solemn song by Nadelson and Justin Dennison. Life is hard enough without death, and in this poem underscored by a haunting song, we see the two inevitably overlapping, and we see the ripples sent out through those left to deal with the pain. This poem taps into the void we end up living in when faced with close death and the nonsensicalness of it all, the emptiness and burden wrapped tight around us.
Associate Editor Joani Reese brings us work by two wonderful poets this month:
What I love most about Sara Biggs Chaney’s art is her obvious delight in choosing wonderfully sonic, alliterative word combinations. Her poem, “The First Time I Bled, I Didn’t Stop” is a bildungsroman in miniature. A girl’s journey to womanhood is frightening but freeing as well, she “[sheathes her] new body /in a cramped bunk bed / and [waits] for the end /but the white night / [flows] on.”
I was first introduced to Mathieu Cailler’s fiction when I guest edited another journal last year and accepted one of his wonderful short stories. Cailler’s work is empathetic, and he is kind to his characters. This poem, “Fragile,” is a narrative that captures the fragility of lives on the precipice of change. Mathieu is equally comfortable in both the worlds of poetry and fiction. He’s a writer to watch and appreciate. Enjoy.
Here’s to thinking like a poet, seeing the connections, and reaching out to the world.