Living Well: Celebrate National Poetry Month!
Living Well Column
By Donna Henderson
Established in 1996, National Poetry Month is the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, teachers, librarians, booksellers, and —of course—poets commemorating poetry’s crucial role in our culture. In fact, poetry existed across cultures long before written languages, as a purely oral tradition, through which shared stories, wisdom, traditions, mysteries and all kinds of experience and information were preserved, embodied (though poetry’s rhythms and other musical elements) and sung.
In fact, I consider poetry so essential a part of “Living Well” that I dedicate my April column to it, every year.
If there is anything uniquely characteristic to poetry (as distinct from other kinds of expressions in language) it is in poetry’s ability to engage us through our senses: in the ways it invites us to taste, smell, hear, touch, and see the world a poem creates, and by way of this, to deeply feel our individual and shared experience of being human. After all, while our minds are where we think things, our bodies are where we feel. For that reason, hearing and reading poetry aloud is often the best way to receive it, for the ways that more fully involves the body, in breathe, movement, and sound.
Earlier this spring, I fell head-over-heels in love with “Pax,” the new collection of poems by Portland poet Annie Lighthart (and published by Newberg’s Fernwood Press), when I attended her Milwaukie (Oregon) Library Poetry Series reading in March. After hearing some of her poems read aloud, I immediately ordered a copy of the collection, and have been savoring it since.
As described on the book jacket, “Pax is a book of peace, a book of love poems to the world [which] ask us to wake to our own remarkable lives and our undeniable connections, to look with a steady eye at the demands of love.” I agree. It is also an invitation to the experiences of awe, wonder and unity available to us in every moment of our everyday lives, as one of my favorite poems in the collection illustrates and invites.
The Verge
Reason is a fine thing, but remember there are other ways
to live: by instinct or passion, or even,
maybe, by revelation. Try it. Come around again to the verge—
that place of about-to-open, near where we comprehend
and laugh and see. Why shouldn’t something marvelous
happen to you? Take even an occasion like this:
a man reading at night looked up at the window to find
a moose looking in, interested and unafraid
with quiet dark eyes. He reports he has never been the same;
he finds the ungainly and miraculous everywhere.
He said it started the next night in the empty window
as he watched his reflection looking right back through.
he said he saw his own beauty, how even in his same old face
the quiet eyes were curious and ready to be true.
(By Annie Lighthart, reprinted here with the poet’s permission.)
Annie Lightheart
Note: “Pax” is available from www.fernwoodpress.com, or through your local independent bookseller. To see and hear Annie reading from —and speaking about— these and other poems in Milwaukie this past March, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDlGqm3jJ54.
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