Michael J Hoover

Inevitably when I am at the playground with my son, some overly eager Mom/Barbie wanna-be, with perfect hair and nails, will bounce over, and after launching into a full rendition of how hard it is to find a good preschool around here and isn’t it terrible what “they’ve” done to the public school system, will then provide me with an (unsolicited) alphabetical list of all her spa, hair and tanning appointments for this week, and ask, “So what do you do for “me time?” I brace myself as I reply, “I write poetry.” I anticipate the eye glazing, the slack mouth stare, the conversation stopping “Oh, how….NICE,” as Barbie slowly backs away from me as if I’ve suddenly sprouted two heads. I know she would really like to ask, “Why poetry?” And, if she would stick around long enough, this is what I would tell her.

I came to poetry early, with parents who believed in reading aloud to their children; Emerson, Longfellow, Stevenson. I cut my eye teeth on language. Marveled at its density. Tried Frost then cummings and later the contemporaries, language poets and the beats. I’m not picky about my (literary) bedfellows. Why should I have to choose a country when the world is so wide? I just want a day pass to cross the border.

I write poetry because it is powerful. As poets, we name things. There is power in naming. It is creation. The ability to recover the sacred, to elevate the mundane and hold to the light whatever catches your eye. Blink and you’ll miss it. When we as poets name things, we have the power to call into being, to create presence, to change the story, to shape the narrative arc. Yesterday my three year old son was jumping on the couch. When I told him, in my best “this is serious” voice, to stop jumping on the furniture he replied, “I’m not jumping, I’m hopping.” This is power.

I write poetry to hold things that need to be remembered. To hold what vanishes. To freeze the essence of the thing named. And the poem, like a series of still frames, tricks our mind to motion. Ocular reflex. A news reel unwinding. As poets, “we are to notice so that (it) is noticed” (Annie Dillard). We hold things that need to be remembered, like rotary phones, the horrors of war, my mother filing her nails into neat ovals.

I write poetry to connect with others. We often seek to animate the details of our life in order to make connections with others. In many ways we are all strangers on the planet struggling to place ourselves within a context of meaning. For some of us poetry helps to create that sense of meaning, not just the writing itself but also the physical poetry community at large. To find others in orbit with you is comforting.

And if I haven’t scared Barbie off yet, I would add that I write poetry because it makes me happy, because it frustrates me, because it scares me and because I have to.

If Barbie were to reply, “But I don’t understand poetry,” I would say, “Pretend that you are dreaming. Pretend that the poem is a dream and you are caught in it. It is you and you are it. Experience it. Just ride the wave. Dreams don’t need a beginning, an end or for that matter even a middle. They don’t have to make sense, or sometimes they do. That is the beauty of poetry. You just experience it. Sometimes you get a full story. Sometimes all you are left with is a feeling. Just like when you awake from a dream with a strong sense of “something happened” but are not quite able to explain it. So dream a little, Barbie, you might just like it!

Altars

She is lonely and you understand
without taking sides.
She says your hugs are like a
battered woman, bruised and full

of invisible scars.
There is a gust of passion
in your voice but she has
run off with the wind.

She sleeps with steel in her eyes
and you are a mask on the edge
of the bed, worried that love will
never come home to warm its
hands over the tall pale candle

in the parlor.
There is a portrait of love
over the fireplace to remind
you of what happens when couples
save their money and their memories,

bury them deep in mason jars in the backyard.
She lies to you twice a day.
You sleep in the same house but
the relationship is long distance.

You share rations for the long haul
while she sips champagne from your shoe.
The treasured altar of your devotion lies askew
at your feet. And you didn’t know it had gone missing;

the candle, the shoe, the jars, her love.
- Julia Tilley

Julia Tilley is our first poet guest columnist. She hails from Harrisburg and co-hosts Poetry Thursdays at the Crimson Frog Coffee Shop in Camp Hill, PA.