Today is Poetry Friday and Jama Rattigan at Jama’s Alphabet Soup is hosting today. She has a sweet post that includes smiles from Helena Nelson.
Last week I spent the week in Minneapolis and one of our many adventures was to visit an independent bookstore called Paperback Exchange. We had so much fun browsing, and we each chose all the books we wanted. My daughter was recommending titles to us. The store owner was chiming in. I found the poetry section, and the first book I picked up was this Poetry of Presence volume.
The editor Phyllis Cole-Dai writes a poem in the introduction: “On How to Pick and Eat Poems”. Two lines from her poem:
So put a poem upon your lips. Chew its pulp.
Let its juice spill over your tongue.
Read the whole poem at Phyllis’ web page here. Listen to her read it here.
Reading that poem at the store sold me on the book. After we got back to my daughter’s house with all our books, I was sorting through my books, looking for the poetry book. After a few minutes, I found it in my husband’s pile, where it’s been ever since. Yesterday, I came home and he was copying Sifter by Naomi Shihab Nye into his journal. It begins with:
When our English teacher gave
our first writing invitation of the year,
Become a kitchen implement
in 2 descriptive paragraphs, I did not think
butcher knife or frying pan,
I thought immediately
of soft flour showering through the little holes
of the sifter and the sifter’s pleasing circular
swishing sound, and wrote it down.
Find the rest of the poem on page 30 in Poetry of Presence.
Weeks ago, I made a note that the Poetry Sisters’ challenge was a diminishing poem in September. I’m giving it a rough try, inspired by Nye’s poem. (I have no idea what that last line means, haha! I’m going to have to try that again!)
Be a tender sifter
of time. Just sift
the bad and sit
with the good–it
weighs on we, then I
Oh, my. I missed this beauty when it was published in 2010. It’s really a long found poem, created from the author’s favorite book of all time: A short story collection called The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. The Author’s Afterword is fascinating and heartbreaking, and I cannot do it justice in summary here. Suffice it to say, the story of this book includes the Holocaust, the Wailing Wall, along with Schulz’s senseless killing and most of his creative work being lost during the war. In the Afterword, Foer writes: “At times I felt that I was making a gravestone rubbing of The Streets of Crocodiles, and at times I was transcribing a dream that The Streets of Crocodiles might have had.”
