why poetry matters

PANDEMIC

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments 
Pandemic
   by Lynn Ungar

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath —
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love —
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.


[Used without permission, and apologies to the author, who lives in Vancouver, Washington. I found this 2020 poem on the OSU website. It went viral last year, but I missed it until now. You can buy her chapbook These Days with this poem on her website via the link.]

But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief. 

― Franz Kafka

Assignment #5: weird revision [last]

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

IMG_4426.jpeg

This is a black oystercatcher. We hear them south and see a mated pair to the north on walks. This photo was taken at a distance using a zoom.

During April, I gave my students poems. Poetry was one of the fatalities of the misguided school reforms of a couple decades ago which insisted English teachers toss most of our curriculum in for a focus on nonfiction. Don’t get me wrong, I had always included nonfiction in my curriculum, but we all deserve poetry in our lives. We all deserve stories, and we should have respect for fiction, since all the ancient texts, all of scripture everywhere in the world involves the supernatural.

“Actress Amber Tamblyn is a passionate poet, and the above quote ‘eat poetry so that your body is made of it’ reminds me of something she said in an interview. When asked ‘why do we need poetry?’ she said, ‘Because we are the poem. Poetry is the thing you don’t write, it’s the thing you feel, it’s what you kiss, it’s what you sleep in, it’s what you smell, the way in which we need each other, the way in which we understand death without having experienced it.’ ” Continue reading →