{"id":9025,"date":"2020-04-15T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2020-04-15T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/?p=9025"},"modified":"2020-04-15T07:41:56","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T13:41:56","slug":"what-to-read-now-a-celebration-of-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/2020\/04\/15\/what-to-read-now-a-celebration-of-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Read Now: A Celebration of Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover<\/a>My colleagues and I often review recently acquired books by our library\u2014most often fiction\u2014for this blog, but this post, in honor of April, National Poetry Month, focuses on a few selected poems. Poetry, as Auden so famously wrote, \u201cmakes nothing happen.\u201d And yet, it offers us powerful insights about the human condition in a language that is not only beautiful but also precise<\/i>\u2014a most welcome antidote to the enveloping haze of uncertainty many of us experience at this historical moment.\u00a0 <\/span>Poems do justice to the range of human emotions\u2014from sadness to fear to hope\u2014that we feel but may not be able to articulate, to name.<\/i> They are also reminders of our human connections, many of them intangible these days and sorely missed.\u00a0 <\/span>Projecting the human voice, poems create intimacy:\u00a0 <\/span>in the words of John Ashbery, \u201cthe poem \/ Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.\u201d Reading human history through poetry\u2019s sharp prism, we acknowledge our collective angst but also our joys and glories, past and to come.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first stanza in Billy Collins\u2019 \u201cBooks\u201d takes us into a place we know well:<\/span><\/p>\n

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus<\/span><\/p>\n

I can hear the library humming in the night,<\/span><\/p>\n

a choir of authors murmuring inside their books<\/span><\/p>\n

along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,<\/span><\/p>\n

Giovani Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, <\/span><\/p>\n

each one stitched into his own private coat,<\/span><\/p>\n

together forming a low, gigantic chord of language. <\/span><\/p>\n

Our library, the building, is closed, but that \u201cgigantic chord,\u201d that \u201chum,\u201d binds us all.\u00a0 <\/span>That \u201cchord\u201d may also be perceived as the worldwide web; we are fortunate to be living in an era when the internet gives us access to texts of all kinds. One resource among many is the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, which offers us an abundance of riches, poems from across the globe. (https:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/<\/span><\/a><\/span>)<\/span><\/p>\n

In our virtual library, let us reach for Alive Together<\/i>, New and Selected poems<\/i> (1992) by Lisel Mueller (1924-2020).\u00a0 <\/span>Born in Germany, Mueller, at the age of fifteen, fled the Nazis and, along with her family, settled in the American Midwest. The traumatic upheaval and the adjustment to a new country and language are among the motifs of her poetry, as in the 1992 poem \u201cCurriculum Vitae\u201d: \u201cMy country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.\u201d And yet, in the face of adversity, she remarks on those common sources of inner strength we can draw upon to retain our sense of self and dignity as human beings. In \u201cYour Tired, Your Poor,\u201d for example, we hear an imaginary dialogue played out between a refugee and the immigration officer. He tells her to leave her previous life \u201cat the border, bundled and tied.\u201d She witnesses him \u201criffling\u201d through her life \u201cwithout looking, \/stamp it and put it out the back\/ for the trash collector.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Yet, the refugee knows better. Standing free \u201cin the desert,\u201d she has managed to \u201csmuggle in\u201d what is most precious: \u201cbehind my eyes and under my tongue:\/ memory and language.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Mueller went on to win multiple awards, including the Pulitzer. She made her home for forty years near Libertyville in Lake County, Illinois, a setting that inspired her frequent meditations on living in the Midwest.\u00a0 <\/span>In \u201cLetter to California,\u201d she reminds us of the seemingly never-ending winter, which \u201cswallows two seasons and throws its shadow over a third.\u201d The final lines of the poem, however, tell a different story:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026..But we have<\/span><\/p>\n

Our intimations: now and then<\/span><\/p>\n

a cardinal with its lyric call,<\/span><\/p>\n

its body blazing like a saint\u2019s<\/span><\/p>\n

unexpectedly gaudy heart,<\/span><\/p>\n

spills on our reasonable scene<\/span><\/p>\n

of brown and gray, unconscious of itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

I search the language for a word. <\/span><\/p>\n

To tell you how red is red. <\/span><\/p>\n

Domestic life, in Mueller\u2019s poetry, loses its banality and is observed anew. In \u201cThings,\u201d she comments on human loneliness, which can be a source of imaginative reconstruction of the ordinary: <\/span><\/p>\n

What happened is, we grew lonely<\/span><\/p>\n

living among the things,<\/span><\/p>\n

so we gave the clock a face,<\/span><\/p>\n

the chair a back,<\/span><\/p>\n

the table four stout legs<\/span><\/p>\n

which will never suffer fatigue.<\/span><\/p>\n

We fitted out shoes with tongues<\/span><\/p>\n

as smooth as our own\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Not far from Mueller on the shelf, we find W.S. Merwin.\u00a0 <\/span>In \u201cBefore a Departure in Spring,\u201d he invites us to celebrate the coming of spring and its exuberant burst of colors:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Once more it is April with the first light sifting<\/span><\/p>\n

through the young leaves with dew making the colors<\/span><\/p>\n

remember who they are the new pink of the cinnamon tree <\/span><\/p>\n

the gilded lichens of the bamboo the shadowed bronze <\/span><\/p>\n

of the kamani and the blue day opening<\/span><\/p>\n

as the sunlight descends through it all like the return <\/span><\/p>\n

of a spirit touching without touch and unable<\/span><\/p>\n

to believe it is here and here again and awake\u2026.<\/span><\/p>\n

This spring, with all its beauties, is accompanied by tremendous anguish and heartache.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps a glance at previous harsh times in history can offer us a bit of solace. Carl Sandburg\u2019s \u201cThe Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany\u201d opens with an epigraph, a quotation from the President\u2019s message to the Congress on December 1, 1862.\u00a0 <\/span>Lincoln\u2019s words are strangely applicable to our own times: \u201cWe can succeed only by concert\u2026The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, our challenge is to \u201cthink anew\u201d but also, as Sandburg suggests in the opening line of his poem: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>\u201cBe sad, be cool, be kind.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My colleagues and I often review recently acquired books by our library\u2014most often fiction\u2014for this blog, but this post, in honor of April, National Poetry Month, focuses on a few selected poems. Poetry, as Auden so famously wrote, \u201cmakes nothing happen.\u201d And yet, it offers us powerful insights about the human condition in a language <\/p>\n

continue reading<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-books","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8GMS7-2lz","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9025"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9031,"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9025\/revisions\/9031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}