![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dept. of a Different Way to Communicate
Sunday, 10 April 2011 10:29 pmNational Poetry Month
Others on my f'list have mentioned that April is National Poetry Month; a few have posted some of their favorite poems. I'd like to do that, too.
It sounds very simplistic to say "I love poetry," but sometimes saying something like this is simple, rather than simplistic.
I do love poetry. There are times that verse and blank verse can speak to us, or speak on our behalf to others, in a way that even the most eloquent prose can not. It can be rigorously intellectual, it can be an emotional tone poem, it can be transcendent and spiritual, it can tell us things we don't know, or have forgotten, or need to understand, about our world. It can be all of those things, and more.
Put simply (that concept again!), poetry can be a particularly rich and nutritious food for our hearts and our minds. It certainly is for me. There have been times, in fact, when it is more food for me than food. (Which is a horrible, horrible sentence.)
So, in honor of what poetry has taught me and given me, here is a poem by Alden Nowlan. He was born in 1933 in Windsor, Nova Scotia, just a few miles from where I grew up. He was primarily self-educated and a newspaperman, two more reasons I think he's awesome. He died in 1983, after having won the Governor General's Award for Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and having won a reputation for the marvelous gatherings of people that flocked regularly to his home.
This poem, "The Red Wool Shirt," is, I think, Nowlan at his best. This is the Maritimes in which I grew up, this is fishermen's lives, and he puts it together with just the right number of calm, clear-eyed, remorseless words.
Others on my f'list have mentioned that April is National Poetry Month; a few have posted some of their favorite poems. I'd like to do that, too.
It sounds very simplistic to say "I love poetry," but sometimes saying something like this is simple, rather than simplistic.
I do love poetry. There are times that verse and blank verse can speak to us, or speak on our behalf to others, in a way that even the most eloquent prose can not. It can be rigorously intellectual, it can be an emotional tone poem, it can be transcendent and spiritual, it can tell us things we don't know, or have forgotten, or need to understand, about our world. It can be all of those things, and more.
Put simply (that concept again!), poetry can be a particularly rich and nutritious food for our hearts and our minds. It certainly is for me. There have been times, in fact, when it is more food for me than food. (Which is a horrible, horrible sentence.)
So, in honor of what poetry has taught me and given me, here is a poem by Alden Nowlan. He was born in 1933 in Windsor, Nova Scotia, just a few miles from where I grew up. He was primarily self-educated and a newspaperman, two more reasons I think he's awesome. He died in 1983, after having won the Governor General's Award for Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and having won a reputation for the marvelous gatherings of people that flocked regularly to his home.
This poem, "The Red Wool Shirt," is, I think, Nowlan at his best. This is the Maritimes in which I grew up, this is fishermen's lives, and he puts it together with just the right number of calm, clear-eyed, remorseless words.
( I was hanging out my wash )
