Poem in Your Pocket: 7 Poems & Their Reverberations

The Academy of American Poets launched National Poetry Month in April 1996. The goal of National Poetry Month is to remind all that in a world awash in text, poetry matters. Every April since, poetry readers and nonreaders alike can’t help but notice poetry cropping up amongst the blooms of spring—poems suddenly adorning sandwich boards and subway cars, Instagram feeds, drivetime radio and especially in local library displays. This year, Off the Shelf invited four lovers of poetry to contribute a post for a Poem in Your Pocket series to gift our readers a new poem for every day of the week. Below is the final installment in this series.

We can make our minds so like still water  

That beings gather about us that they may see, 

It may be, their own images, 

And so live for a moment with a clearer,  

Perhaps even with a fiercer life  

Because of our quiet. 

From "Earth, Fire and Water" by William Butler Yeats

Many already know the Irish poet W.B. Yeats—and should—from multiple famous poems, but these six lines are excerpted from a longer work in the more obscure The Celtic Twilight. Brief but potent, Yeats makes us reconsider our inner chatter and restless minds, while slipping us a touch of meditative poetic psalming (and balming). Beatific, easy to read and clear and concise—but rattling and overturning too—he upends the status quo, affects a disequilibrium and locates the quiet, the dynamism of stillness—and stillness shared, an unexpected effect—and oneness, lucidly and fiercely so. (More from The Celtic Twilight) 

"Hunting Girliness" by Threa Almonstaser (from The Wild Fox of Yemen) - Contemporary poets lay down your pens...and resolve yourselves with this poem and its language: language-as-hunting; as expression; as the inexpressible sought with serpent tail tombing, pummeling skin purple, barbing headscarf, copperheads in the kitchen and crammed with mute troubadour. Ah, Ms Almontaser—hats and hijabs off.  How’d you get it so fiery, half in-your-face, oblique, out loud, interstitial, unobvious, on all fours, twos and ones—and every other untangled art—niftily reconfigured, netted and released, hunted, shot dead, resurrected, a poem-song succoring? And with conviction?!  (Note: this is the opening poem from the above winning collection of the 2021 BPL Literary Prize.)

"Danse Russe" by William Carlos Williams - It doesn't get much more fun than this poem. A bizarre, quiet triumph of a strange domestic nature—true, crisp, amusing, and emotionally precise. Williams, famous for one of the shortest anthologized poems ever, "The Red Wheelbarrow" (16 words!), his book-length quasi-autobiographical poem "Paterson", and for his position statement on poetics—'No ideas but in things' as this poem exemplifies. And such things: flame-white discs, silken mists, shining trees—honed and layered, with a short-monologue song building an active finale—all of it, vivid, dynamic, and slyly wild. And with a bonus punchline ending! (More by William Carlos Williams)
      
"Dedicated to the Late John Coltrane" by Kazuko Shiraishi (from Seasons of Sacred Lust) - ‘A blue rain began to fall…Walking through the cosmos/ …his stride helps us see the blue/Unstable vertebrae of earth’ –Just a couple (blue) lines pulled from Kazuko Shiraishi’s multi-colored poem upon the death of John Coltrane; one of the best Coltrane poems; a song in itself; a song for the saxophonist supreme—a love supreme— Saint Coltrane, as Shiraishi casts him. Coltrane, thus—by way of the poem, his art and his life—entering the mystical pantheon of love and other via a formidable giving and sonic exploration, the same, for said artist. The poem punctuates journey points, soulful and saxophonic contributions and contemplations, penance, pursuance, and renewal, spirit traveling and blowing thoughts, with Shiraishi working herself up to them, each small and giant step, poetic and musical line. At poem’s beginning, and signaling his untimely death, ‘Suddenly/He went to Heaven/John Coltrane’ the poem’s Speaker announces Coltrane’s mystical fate, and—yes, as the Speaker says it, so I believe her. And follow along. This poem appears in Seasons of Sacred Lust, one of Shiraishi’s best volumes, and one of her best long poems of similar title, and this, her Coltrane dedication, another. (Listen to the author perform the poem with jazz accompaniment)

"To Prevent Hypothermia" by Fatimah Asghar (from If They Come For Us) - There are less interesting ways to 'prevent hypothermia’ than this, and this—a memory poem, deepened by the feel of cold, of damp, of an oncoming intimacy, sexuality, and impromptu convergence...So, here’s the Speaker as outsider—on the inside, of the bus, her wet clothes, her imagination, with matted hair, with downpours and onlooker boys kept out, sheltered with her starboard sisters, her unexpected assistants, stripping, warming and rubbing her back to life.  A comical-symbolical adolescent resurrection of sorts, with wit and resonance, guileless and unintended, sensual and sensitive, with an overboarding of envy and disconnection, a falling through—and up, to a new self. There’s another poem in Asghar's debut collection (If They Come for Us) called "The Last Summer of Innocence" and this current poem is one of those too—a "last," an exit from what was, an intimation of what is, new, active, other, slightly heavy, in the moment, yet with mindful smile more than furrowed-thinker brow.      

"Wolf OR-7" by Natalie Diaz (from Postcolonial Love Poem) - Somehow this poem is like an X-ray or an X-ray laid atop an X-ray—a lingual X-ray, two narratives, collusive—written in night-vision, night-vision camera pseudo-scribing, a saved extinction, conservation, nature, and love...The back cover of Postcolonial Love Poem, the Pulitzer-prize winning book containing this poem, shows a woman photographed from behind, her dark hair hanging down her blurred back, an arm lifted, hand on head, but—the arm, delicate, pink-white bones shining through, suggesting muscle, ligament, a nervy inward blood-light. And Wolf OR-7 in pursuit of a mate, the sensuous Speaker in possession of one, juxtaposed posts, his search, her capture, each mimicking and memorizing, with wolf traced on screen, in light, and lover’s body traced, in flesh, trembly path, trembly heart, Canis Lupus, nature stalk, instinct, desire, biologic beauty, Loba, lover, beloved—Her, with Diaz lyrically charting each course.

"The World is Not All That Great" by Hafez (from The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door) - On first reading, this Hafez poem may appear downright nihilistic, which would be unusual for a Sufi-mystic poet and poem. But read a little deeper and realize that this ghazal (the form of poem) sets its suggestive sights, like so many of Hafez’s poems, on the invisible world that exists within—and beyond—the material world...the material world offering a multitude of lures and attractions but, ultimately, none being great enough to surpass the poet’s inward vision, his seeing-eye surrender to another sphere that is all that great, though not named specifically for it is, of course, like Li Po’s Tao, unnamable. Hafez, by the way, is greatly influenced by the most-superb Sufi-mystic poet, Rumi, who predates him by a century or so. The thirty poems that make up this volume rival Rumi and all great Sufi-mystical poems—a poetic genre expressing the inexpressible, the inchoate, the ecstatic idea of the holy, the sacred nature of existence, both seeable and unseeable, often by way of a whirling-writ-word route encapsulating myriad mundane-divine reunions.

---

Philip Brunetti is an Adult Services Librarian for BPL and is also the author of the novel Newer Testaments and other published literary works.