Joy Harjo, my personal poet-crush (Nikita Gill I will always think you are the beginning, middle, and end of all things awesome you are a poetess and a kick-ass goddess of a writer). But Joy has moved into my love-fest as well. She played the saxophone and read her poetry in between sets and I fell in poet-love. She rocked the whole conference. Where can I buy ’I Joy’ T-shirts? Anyone?

I joined a fair amount of poetry sessions which were both wonderful and informative and one or two that were sadly, deeply demotivating. Actually, it was just one. And it was eye-opening. 

If Poetry Makes You Feel Less – You’re Reading the Wrong Kind

I can see now why people can be put off by poetry – through no fault of some of the obviously highly intelligent hosts with poetry both complicated and multi-layered, a small amount of it felt abstract and unattainable. I read a poem to get punched in the gut, not to wonder if I have brain damage, or if I’m too dumb or uneducated to understand it. (This coming from someone with a degree in psychology and literature.)

I feel like I should put up that disclaimer about ‘the columnists views and opinions may not reflect those of the studio, please be advised…’ I’m being completely honest here – and I hope I’m not offending anyone. If you write highly cerebral poetry – please continue to do so. 

I attended a seminar on science and poetry and how they intersect and I found all those wonderful women to be approachable, with material both beautiful and meaningful. So, it isn’t ‘big words’ or even science as subject matter that threw me off.

Poetry Written To Impress

This is obviously highly personal – but one or two (okay it was the one) felt like they were trying to impress us with their writing methodology? With the ability to create metaphor and throw complex concepts around to prove how well-read, how intelligent, how obviously talented they were.

It was as if they were writing in code, and only those people with the right education and reading lists could know what they were saying. It’s this kind of ridiculousness that stops people from even trying to write poetry. And that makes me really mad.

Poetry Is For Everyone

Poetry should be accessible to everyone, and not just a select few sitting in ivory towers, passing poems back and forth in an endless closed loop of approval. Poetry should be guttural, immediate, the roar of a hungry bear at your door, the call of a wolf pack tugging at your wild soul to run and play. It should be the crying child, the growl of an alley-cat jumping to the top of a fence.

Poetry should bring that apple you’re eating into sharp relief, so you can taste it, so you can slow down. Poetry should be a tool for social change, sure, but also for every-day meditation. You should be able to write about the red leaf falling that reminded you of your grandfather who just passed. That’s what poetry is. It’s the connection of a moment in my life to a moment in yours and we can all feel that grief and know we are not alone. Good poetry connects and expands and brings the light and shadow of my heart to yours and reminds us we are all the same at our core. Not one of us better than the other.

Sonnets Are Hot

So just to be clear, I’m not talking about any specific form of the poetry. I attended an amazing seminar on sonnets and I am now super ‘hot’ for sonnets. I’m going to learn more about how to do it right so I can play around with this old-school form of poetry and I can’t wait – whoot!

I am at odds with the intention of the poem. If it’s just to prove how skilled you are – go learn a sport. Poetry is for artists and explorers and lovers. Wow I’ve just offended everyone who has ever played an organized sport. (Of which I am one! Field Hockey in grade school – hiyo!) I think you know where I’m going. 

Poetry isn’t for preeners. 

It’s for those of us who are pierced by the joy of a dog laughing in the sun. It’s for those of us who feel deeply, and need to use the plain black font to put some space between the world and our hearts. It’s for the playful, the grief-stricken, that community of souls who believe there is truth to be found at the end of a pen.

Good poetry won’t necessarily make you feel happier, but it will make you feel connected. In short, good poetry makes you feel more human, never less.

Disagree? Tell me all about it at angela@diymfa.com]

Angela Yeh hails from Atlantic Canada but lives and works in Texas – after her liberal arts degree she wandered into Corporate America but managed to escape. She is a staunch advocate for writers and literacy/learning with her online writing community at DIYMFA.com. She also teaches a love of creative gardening to pre-k kids in her physical community. She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and two cranky fur babies. You can check her out on Insta – @thatpluckygirl or at her website, www.thepluckycanadian.com

The post Poetry Is For You (Yes, You.) appeared first on DIY MFA.

I bought ‘American Sunrise’ on Audible first, by accident, but I am so glad I did. Usually, I prefer hard copies for poetry books so I can underline at my leisure, and to stop at a particular passage to think about what and how they’ve written something.

American Sunrise is narrated by Joy herself, and while I encourage people to buy the hard copy too, hearing her speak her own poems in her own voice is a delicious indulgence. I cannot overlay my white perspective on top of her melodious, sometimes haunting intonations. Her voice turns her words into birds that fly over me too high to reach.

The Trail of Tears

I had never heard of The Trail of Tears. Maybe it is because I’m Canadian by birth, or because I’m white, or because my privileged education did not have the courage to embrace all of our history both cruel and horrifying.

The first few poems immediately pull me into the mud and bafflement of being thrown out of my own home, on my own land. Of having my children taken from me and forced to learn about a strange god in a foreign language, their homemade clothes suddenly not good enough. The trail of tears and everything that went along with it is a grief-rupture that is carried along ancestral DNA from parent to child. It is difficult to sit through. And it is not theirs alone to endure. If 2020 has taught me nothing else it is that no community suffers in isolation. What affects one will spread to the other. We are all connected. Hurt never stays contained within the one holding it.

Standing Witness

The imagery gives me chills –  the line from “How to Write a Poem in a Time of War”, ‘The torn pocket of your daughters home made dress…’ makes me want to cry and I am not a crier. I am a mother though, and this line makes me want to fight, and cry, then fight-cry.

In the past I would have stopped reading. I would tell myself this is hard, and you’ve had enough hard in your own life, and there is nothing to be done about it now. But this is 2021 and I am still alive and so I don’t turn away, feeling like it is my duty. It is my personal responsibility to both our ancestors to stand witness to her pain. And there is pain. There is grief. There is also this strange and wild voice threaded throughout her poetry, startling me like birds taking flight abruptly. 

Startling because it feels familiar. And even though I do not have even a ghost of a similar experience to relate to, even though this is the first time I am hearing these stories from her grandmothers, I find an echo of my own pain in hers, a glimmer of shared human suffering. Her poetry calls for us to stand still for a moment and listen to what was lost.

Humor connects us quickly but it is a light touch. A lover’s graze. This deep mourning, this sharing of her grief through poetry is a mother’s birth travails. There is hurt you don’t think you’re going to survive, and there are tears. In the end there is a love that shatters you more completely than suffering ever could. 

Shovels of Grief

She doesn’t shy away from the heavy topics, the thoughts we try not to think. In her poem “Singing Everything”, she reminds us that ‘For death, those are the heaviest songs. They have to be pried from the earth by shovels of grief.’

When you think you’re just reading a Joy Harjo poem and then the words slant sideways and winnow down deep inside your being to a sacred, secret place you are surprised to find is there. 

And it blooms, awakens, shoots out like a fire-cracker lilly back into the poem that birthed it and you are connected as surely as to a telephone line. You are never the same. This is the wonder of poetry in general and the skill of Harjo in particular.

As usual, Rumi said it better than I ever could:

Cry Easily

Keep your intelligence white-hot

And your grief glistening,

So your life will stay fresh.

Cry easily like a little child.

And so, I think I will cry. And then maybe dance a little, just like in her poem “Seven Generations.” I’ll dance and cry, and hold space for the relief of grief. 

Angela Yeh hails from Atlantic Canada but lives and works in Texas – after her liberal arts degree she wandered into Corporate America but managed to escape. She is a staunch advocate for writers and literacy/learning with her online writing community at DIYMFA.com. She also teaches a love of creative gardening to pre-k kids in her physical community. She lives with her husband, two lovely human children, and two cranky fur babies. You can check her out on Insta – @thatpluckygirl or at her website, www.thepluckycanadian.com

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