April is National Poetry Month! Who knew? And who cares?
We all do! To encourage us to acknowledge the importance of poetry in our lives, the citizens of my hometown have been asked to participate in a community project: we will each select a treasured poem, or write one, and submit it for publication in a volume titled North Brookfield’s Favorite Poems: A Town Collection Vol II.
I’m not a poetry fan–I’m more partial to prose, perhaps due to some innate unease with imagery and nuance. In other words, I don’t have a life-list of hundreds of poems I really love. So in less than 24 hours after hearing about the project, I produced the following list of ten poems I’m considering for submission. In alphabetical order by poet’s name, they are:
- W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
- Matsuo Basho, “Whippoorwill Haiku”
- Wendell Berry, “A Timbered Choir”
- C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”
- Mahmoud Darwish, “Remainder of a Life”
- Willem Kloos, “Sonnet”
- Federico Garcia Lorca, “Rider’s Song”
- W. S. Merwin, “Fox Sleep”
- Ozcan Yalim, “Inside-Outside”
- Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”
By the May 1st deadline, I’ll have to pick one of these and write a paragraph or so about why the poem is important to me. Stay tuned. . .
Now, does anything strike you about these choices? Hmm, for one thing, there are no women represented. Do I have a subconscious preference for the DWM (Dead White Male) literary tradition? But no, there’s the Japanese poet (thank goodness for the seemingly accessible haiku form), and a few of these guys are gay, so I’ve got that gender thing covered. And seven of the ten did not write in English, so maybe my tastes are not that conventional after all.
If you’d like to read the text of any of the listed poems, please email me or leave me a comment. Due to copyright infringement issues, I will not post them in this blog.
Note from the sponsor: This program is supported in part by a grant from the North Brookfield Cultural Council, a local agency that is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
Hi Becky:
I enjoyed reading your blog–and thanks for the reminder about the poetry collection. I have a contribution and I hadn’t read the part about “why the poem is important to me” so it was helpful for a reminder and what to do. I guess I’ll forward it to Helen–I’ll try to find it on the Internet. The poem is an old one, “Let Me Live in a House by the side of a Road” or something like that. I read it at my mom’s funeral as it seemed to express her “person” best.