I can always tell when I haven't been getting enough. My ears begin to ache with the low din of disorder and the noisome burdens of the information age begin to overwhelm and when everything begins to sound like everything else...then I know I haven't been getting enough poetry. A daily dose would, like an apple or exercise or the habit of prayer, serve as a preventative against most vexations.
"Rescued by the Word"
Thomas Lynch
Poetry books don't sell well and poetry isn't especially user-friendly. But poetry can make us think, and poems can be life-changing in a subtle but powerful way. Poetry is a way of looking at the world we take too much for granted. But the very best thing about poetry? Something for everyone, from Bob Dylan's Gates of Eden to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
Below is a poem by Mary Oliver, published in 2008 on Garrison Keillor's excellent Writer's Almanac public radio program. The Writer's Almanac is also available as a daily email subscription. Give it a try, in honor of National Poetry Month.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
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