Some people graced me with a gift recently and my thanks to them was a poem. I’m unsure that they understood the preciousness of the gift — to me, for them — but I believe that a poem is always appropriate to commemorate an occasion.
National Poetry Month was launched 25 years ago, in April 1996, by the Academy of American Poets. The objective was to “remind the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters.” I don’t remember much about the poems and poets of my youth, but I cannot forget those I met when enrolled in English courses at Indiana University Southeast. One professor, Millard Dunn, was a poet himself, and another, Richard Brengle, gave me the gift of “A Blessing,” a poem by James Wright. He had called me into his office, having seen me passing in the hall, and asked that I listen to “something beautiful.” No poet ever read as wonderfully as did Dr. Brengle that day, and more than 40 years later, I still cherish that blessing.
I do remember one poetry moment from my youth. I was a freshman in high school, sitting in class and watching a black and white TV as a small and shaky Robert Frost read his poem, “The Gift Outright.” This was the first inaugural that I had seen, and the first in history at which a poet read their work. Sixty years later, Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first U.S. Youth Poet Laureate, read her poem at the presidential inauguration of Joseph R. Biden. I made my 2½ year-old granddaughter watch her as she spoke, a moment she’ll not remember. The 23-year-old Gorman’s poem opens with these lines: “When day comes we ask ourselves / where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”
My social media practice is to post a poem each day in April, most of which are culled from the anthologies and books of poems that line my bookcases. I tend toward the shorter poems as an acknowledgement of the attention span of those of us in the digital age. I remember seeing an acronym: “TLDF.” This stood for “too long, didn’t finish” and I am often guilty of giving up on an article that turns out to be longer than my info-snacking self wanted to read. I am no longer the weekday caretaker of my youngest granddaughter, but during some time in the moments that I can steal with her, I try to distract her from videos on “her” phone (her mother has a spare, designated for her) and read to her from Julie Merberg and Suzanne Bober’s poetic offerings illustrated by the paintings of famous artists. Unfortunately, my granddaughter is less and less interested in “Quiet Time With Cassatt,” or “In The Garden With Van Gogh.” I can hardly keep her still long enough to recite Jack Prelutsky’s “I Love You More Than Applesauce,” a poem I learned from my grade-school teacher friend.
I will make an effort to expand my poetic intake because I love poetry and enjoy sharing it. I know a woman who can recite Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay;” she learned it after seeing the movie “The Outsiders.” (She also knows, by heart, a poem I wrote: “Baptist Sunday Morning: Hot.”) Amanda Gorman’s poem ends, “The new dawn blooms as we free it / For there is always light, / if only we’re brave enough to see it / if only we’re brave enough to be it.”
I’d like to see that new more poetic dawn for my three young and beautiful grandchildren.
cjon3acd@att.net