Why to Read a Poem Every Morning

It's 5:30 a.m. and I'm tucked into a corner of the couch reading a poem to an injured bird on my lap.

I'm reading "Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets" by David Young, page 78 in an anthology called Poetry 180. For a while now, I've been reading just a poem or two from this book each morning — after Wordle but before the return of full sentience.

I normally read the poems silently to myself. But because yesterday we found an injured young starling and I decided to try to help¹, and now have him nestled in a towel on my lap to give him a change of scenery from his recuperation box, I am reading David Young's poem quietly aloud.

The bird likely does not know from Adlai Stevenson, but that's the thing about poetry. Some details we understand, some we don't.

True of injured birds as well.

The poem² is set in 1956 at a Maine resort where the protagonist cleans fish for vacationers. That's part of his job, "along with luggage, firewood, Sunday ice cream, waking everyone by jogging around the island every morning swinging a rattle I hold in front of me to break the nightly spider threads."²

At first, I am shy about hearing my voice, the way I can be self-conscious about reciting a prayer aloud. But I feel a duty to the words, so I read more boldly. The poem, which is pretty compelling on its own, becomes more so when read aloud, although you wouldn't know it by looking at the bird, who is breathing softly in and out, eyes shut.

All of this is to say that in my ongoing effort to survive the raging river of our contemporary world, I have found small, firm rocks on which to step, and poetry in the morning is one more.

We cannot be doomscrolling and reading a poem at the same time. We cannot be watching the politics shows or wondering how hot the planet will be next year and reading a poem at the same time, unless the poem is about global warming, in which case straighten your spine or turn the page.

When I saw Poetry 180 on the store shelf, I grabbed it without a second thought. I trusted its editor, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, to have chosen poems which, to quote a poet I know a bit, "don't require a decoder ring."³   I trusted Collins to choose well-made poems that might meet me more than halfway. I don't follow contemporary poets enough to find them on my own without stumbling on poetry written only for other poets and editors of poetry journals. Those usually bring about despair.

And yet there is only so much Mary Oliver a non-poetry-reading poetry reader can read without wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea to search out other voices.

Plus, I must admit something here with the hope that the whole sentiment is heard: Social media is ruining Mary Oliver for me.

If somehow you have missed the wondrousness of Mary Oliver (1935—2019), whose observations of self and nature are transporting and soul-feeding, I encourage you to Google her and find a poem to read. It will probably be "Wild Geese,"⁴ which hasn't quite reached "Casey at the Bat" popularity, but it's only a matter of time. Weeks, maybe. "Wild Geese" and a few others show up on Facebook with regularity because people are so moved and want to share the experience of reading such a fine collection of words. It's understandable.

But over time, I have begun to wonder, "Is Mary Oliver the only poet we know?" and "Is Mary Oliver becoming a Facebook cliche?"

And before you know it, I'm getting a little angry at Mary, although of course none of it is her fault.

So I take Billy Collins's hand and he introduces me to a few other vaguely familiar poets as well as many I have never heard of. And in the morning, I meet one or two, get to know their voices and the world through their eyes, and reconnect with what it is to be human.

Poetry 180 is, to quote the marketing copy, "inspired by Billy Collins's poem-a-day project with the Library of Congress." Just after he became Poet Laureate in 2001, he started a project called Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools⁵, in large part to push back on the epidemic of young readers' disaffection for the form.

"What some students experience when they are made to confront a poem might be summed up in a frustrating syllogism," Collins writes.

            "I understand English.
            "This poem is written in English.
            "I have no idea what this poem is saying."

Haven't we all had that experience? Yet the fun isn't in cursing the poets-who-write-for-other-poets. The fun is in finding poems that have something to say — clearly, though preferably not too obviously — to the rest of us. The fun is bumping into a delight, like David Ignatow's fanciful short poem "The Bagel," about chasing after a dropped bagel that keeps rolling faster and faster away, in which the speaker

            "doubled over
            "and rolling down the street
            "head over heels, one complete somersault
            "after another like a bagel
            "and strangely happy with myself."

The reward is discovering Jane Yolen's "Fat is Not a Fairy Tale," which reads in part:
           

            "I am thinking of a fairy tale,
            "Cinder Elephant
            "Sleeping Tubby
            "Snow Weight
            "where the princess is not

            "anorexic, wasp-waisted;

            "flinging herself down the stairs."


The fun, the reward, the payoff, if we want to call it that, is spending a brief time looking at life up close, as we all did as kids, when we'd pluck a blade of grass and hold it between our thumbs and give it the attention it deserved.

Later in the day, when 5:30 a.m. has evaporated into something that seems now to be more like a rumor — am I sure it even happened? — my brain will be hijacked by the tasks of living. By work or shopping, listmaking or budgeting.

I will bury the young bird, who died despite my best care and good wishes, and who might or might not have liked hearing the poem.

I will fret about dinner.

And yes, I will scroll in search of news and laughs and possibly bump into Mary OIiver, whose poem I will refuse to read in the context of political memes and someone's airing of unhappiness over a customer service failure.

But it's all OK. I will already have spent part of my day in the clearing made by a few mindfully chosen words, which were thoughtfully arranged on a printed page.

The words painted their own pictures and asked, in a way,

Hello? Is anybody there?

And I said, yes. It's me. I'm here.

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Notes

1. Helping an injured bird is almost always best left to trained professionals. However, most rehab facilities are not allowed to work with starlings because they are an invasive species.
2. A link to "Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets."
3. Cleveland poet George Bilgere says that.
4. "Wild Geese" can be found here.
5. The Poetry 180 website can be found here.

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About the art

This one is just a humble page from my sketchbook journal.

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