Why I need to make time for poetry (and you should too)….

As the "to-do" list gets longer and the time left to do it in gets shorter, looking for poems to post quickly falls to the bottom of the list. It only makes sense when I’m working full time, studying for the GRE, waiting on pins and needles to see if I have a place to live in a few weeks, and leaving for a trip in a few days that the time to look up (forget reading and (gasp!) enjoying) poetry feels like a luxury. It’s something to be done when there’s nothing else to do and I’m just trying to kill time. I have my day timer right here and can confidently say I don't have time to even casually push in a corner, let alone kill. And with all this poem reading/ posting business being a self imposed project, I can’t help but wonder if anyone would even notice if I stopped all together. 

But then I have to remind myself of why I started this blog in the first place. It’s because too many people consider poetry (and often reading in general) a luxury.  When everything is falling apart, the last place we think to go is the bookshelf and maybe that’s the biggest mistake. To quote Maya Angelou, “When everything is falling apart, go to your knees and then go to the library.” It’s been said hundreds of times before (usually by people much smarter than me), but it's the shared experience of humanness, of happiness or tragedy, or just being captured in one or two lines of well written poetry that keeps us from feeling all alone.  It’s immediate access into a moment and into someone  else's experience. There’s a reason why people wrote and keep writing poems and why we keep reading them.  There’s a reason that why when nothing else in the world makes sense, sometimes the best thing to do is to take a moment alone to sit down with some hot tea and a good poem. I promise, it helps. So if you’re feeling like me today (just a little overwhelmed with living), together let’s take a breath, slow down, and make the time to enjoy an old favorite. And if we’re lucky, word by word (or if it’s a really bad day, letter by letter) we'll be able to look at another person's humanness and slowly make a little more sense of our own.

Poets do it Everywhere

"There was a little girl" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of my very favorite poems as a child but maybe not the best poem for children since the moral is a bit non-existent. Still, great fun to recite at the top of your lungs over and over again until your mother threatens to take your bedtime books away...

There was a little girl
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

Found at: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173916

"The Voice of the Lobster" by Lewis Carroll

My month of children’s poetry continues with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Carroll. People (in my experience at least) don’t talk much about him in terms of poetry. Perhaps because the poems are so woven in with the greater story we don't look at them separately, but slow down to really read it as a poem and I hope you'll see what I mean. Some key elements that make  "The Voice of the Lobster" a noteworthy children's poem- solid structure, an obvious rhyming pattern, whimsical sounds and images you want to revisit time and time again.

The Voice of the Lobster
by Lewis Carroll

"'TIS the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.'
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound."

"I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panter were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Old had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by [eating the owl.]

Found at: http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/carrol01.html

"At the Seaside" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Because the month of June is overwhelming me with all the adult problems I’d hoped to avoid a little bit longer, I’m protesting by posting my favorite children’s poems. Maybe it won’t make finding an apartment easier or paying bills and going to work anymore fun, but it might help me get through a month when everything feels impossible and I wish there was still someone to tuck me at night and read outloud from my favorite books as I fall asleep after a very, very long day.

At the Seaside
by Robert Louis Stevenson

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.