Poets lately

I dig poetry; I love the ambiguity.
                                  It is art and you can interpret it how you like.
Everyone can make it--but not everyone does.  The world is terrible and wonderful and deserving of poetic justice from everyone.

Today I listen to Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye, read by Alise Alousi:

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   

which knew it would inherit the earth   

before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   

watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   

is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   

more famous than the dress shoe,   

which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   

who smile while crossing streets,   

sticky children in grocery lines,   

famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   

but because it never forgot what it could do.

I desire to be famous to you, because you are famous to me.  We all know, say, and express this.
This is poetry--and it is accessible--because it was written that way.  Some ideas aren't accessible by their nature, others are made inaccessible for some reason, for a reason.  I like both.

Recently a good friend of mine recommended a poem by Marie Howe: What the Living Do

An excerpt:

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

This grips me because it is every day.  Life is a poem waiting to be written.  Sometimes I write those poems--the important poems that aren't about battles, tragedies--the poems about the spaces in between.  These poems aren't gaudy because life isn't gaudy.  Life is in your details and in the details you share.  I love your details and I love my details--even the painful ones--and I want to share.  We all want to share on some level.

Mary Oliver writes Bone, an exerpt:

4.

lest we would sift it down
into fractions, and facts
certainties
and what the soul is, also
I believe I will never quite know.
Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving,
which is the way I walked on,
softly,
through the pale-pink morning light.

 and from The Journey:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Thank God we have no choice but to keep ourselves company.  What kind of company do you keep?

Finally, Oliver again from House of Light:

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts 

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking 

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”

Life.  People are great fiery mysteries.  I believe it too.

A couple of personal thoughts in conclusion:

I'm baffled at the everyday poetry we refuse or cannot be bothered to record. It's awareness of the beauty in banal, timeworn moments.
— Steve Pohler (@stevepohler) 29. April 2015

Poetry percolates and simmers, prepared to burst forth violently from every broken or breaking seam of human experience.
— Steve Pohler (@stevepohler) 28. April 2015