What else does this part of autumn bring besides raking our leaf-choked lawns, mid-term exams and finally packing away shorts and sandals? The anniversaries of both the birth and death of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and the annual Dylan Thomas Festival, which coincides with these dates. Fresh on the heels of this year’s October 23-November 10 festival, it’s an appropriate time to remember a man who has greatly influenced writers around the world including innumerable Americans.

For a few days I attended festival events in Swansea, the city where Thomas was born. It was interesting to hear news coverage of Pennsylvania in the last days of the presidential campaign. The election was followed closely in Wales.

Events were held at venues throughout Swansea, but the hub of the festival was the Dylan Thomas Centre. The theme this year was “Performing Dylan.” In addition to an exhibition with the same title, performance aspects of his work and life were especially celebrated and examined. The festival program, along with its partner event, the “Dylan Thomas Fringe,” offered theatrical readings, performances, scholarly lectures, the premier of a Dylan Thomas radio play discovered by his biographer, Andrew Lycett, concerts, poetry readings, and special readings from authors short listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, an international literary prize for authors under the age of 30.

Another first for this fall is that the Dylan Thomas birthplace just opened to tourists. Now, it is possible to stay in the restored townhouse on Cwmdonkin Drive where many of his stories, poems, and plays unfolded. His use of language is legendary and his influence on other writers difficult to estimate because it is so far-reaching. Some of his best known pieces include A Child’s Christmas in Wales, the play for voices Under Milk Wood, and poems such as “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

There was plenty of controversy surrounding the personality of Thomas, as his life was peppered with drinking, adultery and not-always-amenable public behavior. The end of his life is perhaps the most controversial of all. For those interested in looking into the details of his death in New York (while on a tour performing Under Milk Wood) Seren Books has just published Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? by David N. Thomas. He is also the author of Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow which was the basis for the screenplay of the film The Edge of Love. The
film stars Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy and Matthew Rhys (playing Thomas). Its U.S. release is set for the spring of 2009.

This time of year is a fitting one to hit the library or bookstore, or your own bookshelves if you have a copy of his collected poems and just haven’t read it for a while. If you are traveling to New York City, download the new, self-guided walking tour (prepared by Thomas’s daughter Aeronwy Thomas, and Welsh poet Peter Thabit Jones, in association with the Welsh Assembly Government in New York). The map and descriptions follow his footsteps in Manhattan. For more information about the festival, visit the Dylan Thomas web site: www.dylanthomas.com/ . To see a trailer of the film The Edge of Love visit www.theedgeoflove.co.uk/ . Here’s a poem which is not at all like those of Thomas, but coming home to South Central Pennsylvania I thought of his well-known characterization of Swansea as an “ugly, lovely town.” He was very fond of Swansea. I’m very fond of our “ugly, delicious” local chips.

To a Hanover Potato Chip

Both china-delicate
and work-glove-rough, you
snap, flip, shatter,
rub-crash in traffic jams of air and salt
each bubble preserved
each rick-back dive
each broken third
and cracked-off ridge.
You are hard, fragile, ugly,
delicious –
all curves, no planes.
Like bodies, and
like snowflakes, there’s
no other like you.
From the earth you came
and from the kettle,
and screech-wheeled shopping cart.
For a split-second you
are loud. Spectacular. And then
your absence leaves
a pause, an aftertaste,
lonely and subtle as the end of that
kind of phone call.
- Katy Giebenhain

Questions, questions, questions! We are full of questions. Questions are the life-blood of human curiosity and are driven by need, want, and sometimes by the workings of imagination.

We may ask simple questions like, “What time is it?” “Where is the bathroom?” “What does a rutabaga look like?” Sometimes our questions require more than a simple answer such as might be the case when we seek a doctor for treatment, “Which doctor might best help me with my condition and why?” Sometimes the questions that weigh most heavily upon us take us into the forest of no answers where we stumble about and ask, “What would have happened if….” or “How will I be remembered?” And, sometimes our questions stretch us and others to see beyond the walls of how we usually think.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet in El Libro de las Preguntas or The Book of Questions (Copper Canyon Press, 1974), created his final work in question couplets. His questions have no obvious answers, but simply serve to take the reader outside the usual boundaries of thinking and into the world of imagination and/or examination of self and the condition called human. Here are a few of Neruda’s lovely and/or provoking couplets:

If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?

Where does the rainbow end,
in your soul or on the horizon?

What forced labor
does Hitler do in hell?

When I see the sea once more
will the sea have seen or not seen me
- Pablo Neruda

Neruda’s work must have been in the back of my mind the other day as I sat waiting for a poem to come (watched pots and poems never seem to boil). Sitting there in thought, I finally started looking at the scraps of paper on the side of my desk – the scraps with scribbled notes, words that wanted to be more than words, and a few poems-in-progress. It was then this Neruda-like poem of questions came:

Words-in-Waiting

Going through
the scribbled notes,
the faded pieces of paper on the side of the desk,
scraps cloaked in their yellows and whites,
newspapers with writing in the margins,
words, words, words,
discordant hand-maidens to the muse,
words-in-waiting
that never found the hand of marriage,
words that finally gave themselves away
as stand-alone questions at the alter:

Did restlessness rustle her skirts
for others to catch a glimpse of need?

After man made his bed to lie in it,
how come the bed didn’t have a say in the matter?

Why is it so,
harried we hurry to helplessness of habit?

What will merchants of death sell,
when there’s no one left to buy?

If weeping is a river that carries you to the sea,
is there danger of drowning?

Why did she remember the corsage he pinned at her waist,
after she wasted away on love that wasted away?

Do cold hands sometimes mean
energy bills are too much to handle?

Does the window of loneliness
ever not open to a larger house?

Why are new dreams
built upon collapse and compromise?

Why was his mouth always on,
like a TV on reruns, not pausing for commercials?

Is a man a solitary sailor
on the ship of fools he laboriously built?

What do the neighbor’s think
of the one who worries about ‘What’ll the neighbor’s think?’

Do clichés wear themselves out
trying too hard for something to say?

Does the island of indecision
have any boats without holes in them?

And, after the congratulations, the photos, the rice in the air,
the floral’d questions with their faded smiles
simply disappeared.
- John Hutchinson

Questions gave this poem a life it may not otherwise have had. I think it is often in these unanswerable questions we see what is at the core of being human, what lies behind the masks we wear, and what it is we often don’t talk about. Questions such as these are worth honoring, nurturing, and pondering for we never know when they may carry us to a shore we have not explored before, maybe as does this final couplet of Neruda’s:

“Where is the child I was,
still inside me or gone?”
- Pablo Neruda

John has two books of poetry in print: A Taste of the Sun by Publish America (also available at Amazon.com) and Sitting in the Bloom of Us, Conversations with Mother (available at Reader’s Café and via email)

First night of autumn, there’s a breeze when I walk the Pekingese. Skateboarders slide by almost silently in the dark. I look back over four years, culminating at Lehigh University and then Trinity College. My nights have become a dark and brooding poem, like the weather in Dublin and Galway, as well as along the Shannon River. My days are enlightened by His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, at whose feet I studied for a week, in awe. No president or pope could have more compassion and unconditional love. A very cheap airline ticket from dad and a friend to stay gratis made the green island a two-week blessing. An internet-saavy sister made it possible for me to learn the mysteries of the origins of the universe from an aging monk.

Dependent origination means that eternity unfurls in both directions, alpha and omega, without end. It also means the answer to all behavior and understanding. The lecture hall was kept at temperatures only a holy mountain dweller could love. Someone gifted me a blanket.

Wet, cold, dark days send the Irish into pubs, bookstores and cathedrals to talk about Oscar Wilde over strong tea, Guiness, and Bushmill’s. It all falls together with a lot of sense. Climate creates the character of peoples.

Poetry emerged, some ranging across the universes of philosophy and sciences. Also one about a cold-water codfish meal, one about a couple from Spain. I went to James Joyce’s wife’s home. I entered St. Nicholas’ cathedral where Columbus was inspired to explore and touched old, old stone. I fell under a spell through the arches of Trinity, later seeing not only the Book of Kells, but nearly collapsing at the sight of a first-edition, handwritten tome–Dante’s Divine Comedy in that library older than oldness.

The world was a poem, as I strolled down to the sea to buy an ancient ring for my daughter, to munch on spinach salmon quiche in a bag. It was also a poem as I meditated on the end of my nose, taught by a laughing man who loves the Chinese as if they are Tibetan.

I could show you some of the poems I wrote, but I think I am writing some kind of poetry-like prose here, capturing the light in an eye, the setting silver cold north island sun, where I could not survive. Galway was filled to the brim with interesting people, cobbles, stories, songs. When I came home, much felt empty. I’ve thought of moving backwards, but shan’t. I will stretch my mind, my money, my vision. I will move forward and remember the concept of no-thing-ness:

It would seem that the closer you get to the bottom of something the more is-ness it would be of itself, the more like itself, say, an apple would be. But the deeper and smaller or the further and larger one gets, the nature of the thing disappears into nothingness. This fluidity reminds that I too am mostly a river of empty space and energy, moving forward, expanding, learning, growing.

That settled, I do what any self-possessing poet my age would. I head for that rare find, a PhD in Creative Writing. Thank you, my Lama, and thank you, Emerald Isle.

Ode to Eire

I fell in love with a fish from Galway–
a cold-water cod in this crowded cafe,
with chips and curry, a little wine.
I ate heartily; it was gone in no time.

When I got home to Maryland’s Eastern Shore,
I found myself craving that dish even more.
That cod from McDonaugh’s on Quay Street–
it’s the only seafood I still want to eat.

I’ve forgot about oysters, clams, and crabs,
scallops, flounder and bluefish seem drab.
I want that huge codfish, so flaky and gold
from my first trip to Ireland, so rainy and cold.

I didn’t mind the weather and I was happy to pay
for such a great meal on such a gray August day.
So be happy you live there and eat all you can
because I’m back in America, so sad that I am.

I live by the Atlantic near the Chesapeake Bay,
but I want codfish and chips from Ireland every day.
- Susan Beverly

Susan Beverly MLA is Creativity Consultant for Sweetspot Arts and Wellness. Her two latest collections of poetry, The Bodies of Trees, and, The Cool Side of the Pillow are much praised by Michael Glaser, Maryland’s Poet Laureate, one of her long-time mentors. Reach Susan via email.

This week, former Hanover Poet Laureate Dana Larkin Sauers is our guest columnist. Sauers is a member of the Hanover Poets and co-edited Digges’ Choice poetry journal. She has read widely throughout Pennsylvania and Maryland and has been published in various journals. Active in community efforts towards literacy, she hosts a First Friday poetry venue at The Ragged Edge on Chambersburg Street, Gettysburg from 7-9 PM and a bi-annual Open Mic Nite at Delone Catholic High School where she chairs the English department. She has published a nine-year poetry endeavor, Between the Space of Grace and Gray.

It was with some enthusiasm that I received an invitation from my friend Rich Hemmings, host of York Arts’ poetry venue a few weeks ago.

Rich has been the preeminent voice of the York poetry scene for many years. He’s the one who invites renowned poets from New York and New Jersey, arranges readings and signings, feeds and friends them while also putting them up for the night. There’s hardly a poet in the area who doesn’t appreciate what Rich has done for the local spoken word artistic community. He’s a man who goes to great extremes to support expression of all types.

Rich has a penchant for adventure, as well. His invitation to me revolved around the readings of a personal favorite, Polish author Wislawa Szmborska. Local Internet resources place her somewhere in her seventies or eighties. (We volleyed a few jokes about how the majority of us would like to be given a ten-year spread, preferably downward.)

Last Saturday evening, seven poets with seven distinctive voices of various education, occupations and ages as well as interpretations on Szmborska, gathered together and presented previewed and practiced readings for a shoulder-to-shoulder audience in from a damp autumn night.

Perhaps JoAnne Walcerz’s was the most memorable reading. JoAnne is multi-lingual, fluent in English, Polish and Russian. In addition to reading Szymborska’s selection with confidence, vigor and a whimsical attractiveness, she also read them in Polish. These included: “True Love/Milosc Szczesliwa,” “Birthday/Urodziny,” and “In Praise of My Sister/Pochwaia Siostry.”

The audience was treated with a pronunciation lesson and a rendering in both languages. Some attention was provided to the difficulties in translations. Poetry, is perhaps the most difficult because of the translator’s desire to keep intact, to the degree that it is possible, the tonal effect or emotional environment. This is largely accomplished through sound devices such as perfect or imperfect rhyme. Still, through one reading, Joanne focused the audience’s hearing to notice the extent that Szymborska went to create end rhymes that could be fathomed from either language. Joanne herself referred to this piece as Szymborska’s “Dr. Seuss” poem because of the accessibility of the end rhymes.

One of the poem’s that I was asked to recite is entitled, “Thank-You Note.” It’s a rather curious piece in the sense that it is addressed to those “I don’t love.” I appreciate its topsy turvy take. A certain degree of irony is created when what one expects to find following these words is something altogether different. See what I mean:

Thank-You Note

I owe so much
to those I don’t love.

The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I’m not
the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel from them,
the freedom—
love can neither give
nor take that.

I don’t wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient as a sundial,
I understand
what love can’t,
and forgive
as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited, scenery seen.

And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.
They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don’t realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them a thing,”
would be love’s answer.
- Wislawa Szmborska

Having read and been published widely in addition to winning numerous writing contests, Anna continues to promote poetry in our community. She is also a watercolorist and specializes in hand-crafted books. Bowman lives in the Hanover area with her husband Larry.

In our travels around the globe with all its existential glory, I suspect we will not find a more stirring sight than our own Lake Marburg in autumn – its fevered pitch, flaring wardrobe, the daring of it all.

For a couple whose idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon was to walk the trail up to High Rock and back with a bottle of soda and a bag of chips, to now live five minutes from Lake Marburg dwarfs all earlier treats. The lake has become our everyday place, a place of solitude, a place of community, a place to connect with the past and launch the future.

So, to attend an October wedding in the band shell last Saturday was to spend a stunning afternoon at water’s edge in a doorless sanctuaryunder the bluest of ceilings and beside the brightest candles.

All weather-worry risks posed by planning an outdoor wedding were non-existent as sun streamed down on the brilliant pair vowing their everlasting commitment. Sitting in those surroundings and hearing the jubilant declarations, I was struck by the thought of how both a lake and a marriage are subjected to whims of the seasons.

The lake not only endures, but tacks each cycle up on full display. When days fold into straight white lines, we can bundle up and take time out to capture some blue-ribbon stills, deer tracks, and a chance to hear the pines when wind plays them. Spring and summer are peak tourist times and Marburg complies readily with red tablecloths, nesting eagles, sailing frisbees and a million diamonds floating off deck.

The shortest and longest season of the year for Marburgers is the one dubbed almost spring – the sandwiched time when skeletal leaves cling to the base of trees and underbrush collects in gray shadows at midday of any given week. Then, the lake’s saving grace is the certainty that full green is breathing somewhere close by.

Lake Marburg

Sky spins out of the lake
and spans
forever.

Earth side, nothing
but brown edges shaped
by winter’s chafing.

Between the two, a speck
of a man
casts his line.
- Anna Manahan Bowman

Poets like to argue. But most of us are afraid of bleeding so we just stick with words. After all, sticks and stones break bones. Words, on the other hand – despite that great lie – deliver pain in other ways. Yet, they somehow have as much power to heal as to hurt, which is why I like them.

English language poetry has a rich history. Dating as far back as 1631, England has had a poet laureate. John Dryden won the title that year and has been a huge influence on poets of later periods, including Alexander Pope – the most quoted poet after Shakespeare – W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot.

Standing between the Metaphysical Poets, like George Herbert and John Donne, and the Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were Dryden and Pope, two of the best satirical writers in English language history. But it wasn’t until Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that poetry took on an emotional richness that came to be very popular in the U.S.

Interestingly, both of these men were British (Wordsworth was the poet laureate of Great Britain from 1770-1850), but they did have a profound effect on poetry in the United States. Three of the most beloved 19th century poets in the U.S. (Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson) to this day still have wide followings worldwide. All three are usually considered Romantic poets.

Tracing poetic history back to the 17th century, we can see that the turn of the centuries typically have been a bridge to new movements. As Romantic influence began to wane with the death of Whitman, poets emerging in the 20th century took a hard turn away from the heart and toward the head. Thus, the Imagist and Realist schools were born.

Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams had the greatest influence on these newfangled movements. Suddenly, the 20th century and its world wars turned poets toward an interest in trying to paint the world as it is rather than as it should be. Modernism was born and soon after, thanks to certain philosophers of the era, Postmodernism crept in.

For much of the 20th century, poets have been fixated on experimentation and quite often in very odd ways. A reaction to this experimentation led to a movement in the past 20 years called New Formalism, where some poets tried to revitalize the old forms, but much of what has been done by them has been staid. I think it’s time for a new movement.

The 21st century is not just a new century. It is also a new millennium. This era is beset with new technologies, untold violence, and a topsy-turvy re-organization of old structures in religion (ordination of women and gay priests), politics (the spread of democracy and fall of authoritarian regimes), education (charter schools and home schooling), and morality (the rise of alternative lifestyles). We can argue about whether these developments are positive or negative, but what role should poetry play in that argument?

I’m not sure, but I know that poetry is a powerful force. It can make people laugh. It has made them cry. It gives joy and fosters sadness. It can change minds and has influenced some of the developments mentioned above. Because poetry is all about words, it can build up and destroy. But which should it do?

I believe poetry is on the verge of a brand new wave: A re-emergence of heart, if you will, but not necessarily a severing of the head.

New technology like the Internet and the availability of video and audio technology such as never before seen give poets a new power, and along with new power comes new substance. I’m excited about this new turn. The future of poetry in the U.S. and the world is looking for new voices. The mystery is from what corners they may emerge.

Having something taken away, not just missing, but actively taken is jarring. Memory, health, relationships, potential futures, home-countries, so much can disappear, whether the thing is concretely stolen, or perceived to have been stolen. I remember the odd, alarming quality of being robbed at a bank machine near my office in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, or discovering the radio had been pried out of my old Honda in Durham, North Carolina while crunching through the sparkly dread of safety glass in the parking lot. From a small inconvenience to a tragic and life-altering experience, the nature of these losses has a particular character that an accident does not.

When the loss is extreme, being robbed of something or someone can bring us into other territory as well. Where is God? Why is human behavior sometimes so unfair? And then there is the question we ask ourselves less often, “what do I take from others unfairly?”

Here’s one poem where robbery is the actual experience. It resonates in a different way than telling the story through straight narration would. The English poet Philip Gross includes this in his most recent collection The Egg of Zero. I like the echoes of “why” and “how would you know” because it is impossible to keep the question marks out of your own head those first moments when you realize something is gone. A subtle poem, it has an aftertaste, which is something else such experiences have very much in common. Loss lingers. In this case, even a brush with loss lingers.

Unburglars

When we came down and found the back door open
first it was the dash from room to room – video?

stereo? TV? then the private hiding places. All
intact: relief, laced with a rather eager gratitude

like being let off with a caution. Till that night,
tucked down again, every catch and bolt piously

checked, that’s when it came in with the calm assurance
of a curse. They had been. Come and seen, moved through

the house, hardly stirring the dust on the carpet, taking
it all in. Peeling gloves on like a surgeon’s: to them,

a fingerprint would be as gross as skid-marks. And
no need to take a thing – why, when they have it all

and need so little? Little breaths: if they’d bent over you
sleeping (when you could still sleep) how would you know?
- Philip Gross

“Unburglars” reprinted with permission from the author.

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.

What it does is to make me think, laugh, cry, become angry, or feel joy. Poetry can also set a mood. Like most of us, I have the need to get away from my daily grind, and I read poetry in order to do just that. Good poets can create an atmosphere and a private world with their words. There are three poets whom I am currently reading who are excellent at producing this kind of atmosphere.

Sonata for Rain and Basso InContinuo

View from broken window panes
through shades drawn long ago:
sheet covered shapes and dust —
the tone arm still suspended.

In a corner, the cracked cello loses its timbre.
Squirrels scatter through splintered wood.
Branches, abandoned by leaves, fall from the sky.
No birds to sing the morning.

There is no one here,
just the sound of stillness
bouncing off the clouds,
wanting to force out the thunder.
- Rebecca Gonzalez

In this poem, from the highly regarded York County poet’s newly-released book, Sonata for Rain, a moment is frozen. From the very first line, a mood is captured, not through specific physical descriptions but through the use of glancing references to the senses. Sight is used first to set the stage, but we quickly become aware that this moment is dominated by sound, or rather lack of sound. She moves us from the visual of broken windowpanes and a cracked cello in the corner to the contemplation of its lost timbre. However, in this work, it is the absence of sound, (”No birds to sing the morning” and “just the sound of stillness/bouncing off the clouds”) which is most predominant. We are left with a sense of melancholy, silence, and loss without using those specific words. A lesser poet would show us the loss or would use the word melancholy, but a greater poet sets the tone and lets us experience it. This is the craft of a poet.

I want to feel you closer than breath
whispering across fine hairs
a wave of warmth unevidenced
by any entered boundary
slipping through like light,
moving in the direction of my heart.
- Deanna Nikaido

In this poem, Ms. Nikaido doesn’t take us to a specific, physical place but creates a mood, one of love. Many poems of affection provide details of the object of that affection. The face of the loved one or the smile of a child may provide the focus for a verse. However, this poem withholds details in favor of painting a delicate, impressionistic picture of a tender moment of reverie. Again it is the senses, the sense of touch (“I want to feel you closer than breath/whispering across fine hairs”) and sight (“slipping like light/moving in the direction of my heart”) that paint the scene. This poem perfectly describes the moment of reflection when we know we have connected with another soul.

Interlude

she counts what cannot be measured:
the years since a gentle touch
or notes of a lament

the raindrops compose
against the pane

outside her window the world swirls
with the exquisite passion of possibility
barely audible at the frequency of fear

and regret

deaf to the tympani of heart and hope
she presses her lips against
the cool clear glass and pauses

as she waits for the world to kiss her back
- Marissa Allen

The title of Ms. Allen’s poem sends the signal the poem is about a reflective moment and much like Ms. Gonzalez’s poem above, about melancholy. Here, too, she uses the senses, predominately those of sound (“notes of a lament,”) and touch (“she presses her lips against/the cool clear glass and pauses/as she waits for the world to kiss her back”) to create the atmosphere. There is no clear, narrative description of the moment. However, after reading it, we are filled with the sense of isolation and again, loss.

The best poets among us use their craft to set a mood. In the same way that a film director is concerned about lighting and sound, poets create atmosphere by using the senses as their creative instruments, particularly sound, touch, and sight. All three poets, Rebecca Gonzalez, Deanna Nikaido, and Marissa Allen set the scene, create a mood, and illuminate the moment as well as any Broadway director. They are not heavy-handed and obvious in their approaches. They compose their scenes, get out of the way, and allow us to inhabit the experience.

This is what poetry does.

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.”—Joseph Campbell

Our multi-tasking/sound bite/microwave/remote-control culture encourages Noise instead of Noticing; Entertainment, not Engagement. We have instant everything, from messages to coffee. We try to eat, drive, and talk on the phone all at the same time. Our to-do lists have to-do lists, and we wonder why we are perpetually crabby.

But the human heart knows what it requires. Lovers of poetry know the instinctive truth of Campbell’s words. Poetry earns its necessity because it is the Art of Noticing. Poetry is the edifier of what we think and do. In poetry, we find the essential paradox of solitude and communion, the elevation of our language, the intensification of our feelings, the compression of our thoughts. I’ve come to think of reading poetry as the opportunity to remind myself of myself, to wander around in my own soul. The poem might be a stranger’s house, but the mirrors can hold anyone’s reflection.

A perfect line of poetry is an encounter and reminder of not only what is, but what is possible. Yannis Ritsos begins a poem with the line, “The statues were the first to leave,” and we follow after them in eager surprise. Pablo Neruda says, “The horses’ rumps were worlds and oranges,” and we realize a metaphor for the simultaneous vastness and specificity of beauty. Another poet tells us, “I want something difficult and translucent, like birdsong in a time of war,” and we face the challenge of living in this world with all of its wrenching contradictions.

We forget that we were all born as poets; children are innocent Masters of Noticing. A few weeks ago, when autumn was just beginning its suggestions of coolness and color, I was walking my son across the parking lot of his pre-school. Sometimes, when the weather and traffic and timing are right, we hear trains in the distance. That morning was such a morning. My son stopped walking and looked up at me. “Mommy, what is the train asking about?” Of course, I asked him what he meant. His certainty that the train sounded confused and sad was absolute. At the time, I told him that I didn’t know, but in the poet-part of my brain, his question obsessed me. I could not—would not—let it go, until I had written my way into it and through it, until I reached a response that satisfied me. I leave it to individual readers to decide whether my response satisfies them.

ANSWER

“Mommy, what is the train asking about?”—Benjamin, age 5

Somewhere on the other side
of this long sunlight
and the match-flare leaves
the train thinks it’s alive,
shapes the sound
fading away from it
into the same question
over and over.
And because the stones are warm,
and the fields are golden rod poured
around purple vetch,
and the streams quiver
around the elegance of frogs,
I believe that this sound is a lingering—
not a hope for pity,
nor a naming of loss.
– Melissa Carl

Unlike Henry David Thoreau, we may not be able to go to the woods to live deliberately, but we can go to poetry. We can read this column regularly. We can visit the Poetry Daily website to begin each morning with a poem. We can memorize a poem–or even one amazing line— so that we have its music whenever and wherever we might need it. We can carry small volumes of poetry in a pocket or purse. We can nibble poems like fortune cookies as we wait in line at the grocery store. We can make efforts to attend local poetry readings. Poetry can expand the range of what we think and do—both collectively and individually—because poetry demands that we pay attention to the sounds of words and the lives of daisies and the crimes of war; it demands that we respond.

Take some time, look in some poems. Look: there are wind chimes and the amber breath of bees and the exact sadness of an iron bridge at dusk. Owls are naming the moon in their own language. The train is asking a question. Did you notice?