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| Editors: | |
| James Blasingame | James.Blasingame@asu.edu |
| Lori A. Goodson | lagoodson@cox.net |
Lights in the Windows
Years ago a girl handed me a note as I was leaving her proud town of Albany, Texas, a tiny, lovely place far in the west of our big state."I'm glad to know there is another poemist in the world," the note said. "Ialways knew we would find one another someday and our lights would cross."
Our lights would cross. That girl had not stood out to me, I realized,among the other upturned, interested faces in the classroom. How many otherlights had I missed? I carried her smudged note for thousands of miles.
I was fascinated with the earliest poems I read and heard that gave insightinto all the secret territories of the human spirit, our relationships with oneanother. Somehow those glimpses felt comforting, like looking through the litwindows of other people's homes at dusk, before they closed the curtains. Howdid other people live their lives? Just a sense of so many otherworlds out there, beginning with the next house on my own street, gave me agreat energy. How could anyone ever feel lonely? One of the first books Iloved in my life was a thick, gray anthology edited by Helen Ferris, calledFavorite Poems Old and New. I still have my early edition, though it iscoming a little loose at the spine. Rich, intelligent voices spoke to me eachtime I opened its covers. I found Rabindranath Tagore, Carl Sandburg, EmilyDickinson, living side-by-side. I imagined I was part of a much largerfamily.
To me the world of poetry is a house with thousands of glittering windows. Ourwords and images, land to land, era to era, shed light on one another. Ourwords dissolve the shadows we imagine fall between. "One night I dreamt ofspring," writes Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut, "and when I awoke/flowerscovered my pillow." Isn't this where empathy begins? Other countries stopseeming quite so "foreign," or inanimate, or strange, when we listen to theintimate voices of their citizens. I can never understand it when teachersclaim they are "uncomfortable" with poetry -- as if poetry demands they beanything other than responsive, curious human beings. If poetry comes out ofthe deepest places in the human soul and experience, shouldn't it be asimportant to learn about one another's poetry, country to country, as oneanother's weather or gross national products? It seems critical to me. It'sanother way to study geography!
For this reason I was always carrying poems I found from other countries intoclassrooms where I worked as a visiting writer. If American students areprovincial about the literary histories of other places, imagining themselvesto be the primary readers and writers on the planet, it is up to us to helpenlighten them. When I first traveled to India and Bangladesh as a visitingwriter for the Arts America program of the U.S. Information Agency, friendscommented helpfully upon our departure, "Why do you suppose people over therewill care about poetry? They can barely get enough to eat!" Stereotyping ranrampant among even my educated community. In India, poems were shared with uswhich were 7,000 years old. In Bangladesh, an impromptu poetry reading wascalled one evening and 2,000 enthusiastic listeners showed up. Could either ofthose things happen in the United States?
Anyone who feels poetry is an alien or ominous form should consider the stylein which human beings think. "How do you think?" I ask my students."Do you think in complete, elaborate sentences? In fully developed paragraphswith careful footnotes? Or in flashes and bursts of images, snatches of linesleaping one to the next, descriptive fragments, sensory details?" Wethink in poetry. But some people pretend poetry is far away.
Probably some of us were taught so long and hard that poetry was a thing toanalyze that we lost our ability to find it delicious, toappreciate its taste, sometimes even when we couldn't completely apprehend itsmeaning. I love to offer students a poem now and then that I don'treally understand. It presents them with the immediate opportunity of beingsmarter than I am. Believe me, they always take it. They always find aninteresting way to look through its window. It presents us all with a renewedappetite for interpretation, one of the most vibrant and energetic parts of thepoetry experience.
I'm reminded of a dear teacher I had in high school who refused to go on to thenext poem in our antiquated textbook until we had all agreed on the sameinterpretive vision of each poem -- her vision. Wearily we raised ourhands. Yes, yes, that poet was just about to jump off a cliff. Onward! If wecan offer each other a cognizance of mystery through the poems we share,isn't that a greater gift? Won't a sense of inevitable mystery underpinningour intricate lives serve us better than the notion that we will each be givena neat set of blanks to fill in -- always?
Poems offer that mystery. Poems respect our ability to interpret and translateimages and signs. Poems link seemingly disparate parts of experience -- thisseems particularly critical at the frenzied end of the 20th century. I haveyet to meet one person in all my travels who doesn't say they are too busy,they wish they had a little more time. If most of us have lost, as some poetssuggest, our meaningful, deep relationships with the world of nature, poemshelp us to see and feel that world again, beyond our cities and double-lockeddoors. I have learned as much about nature from the poems of Mary Oliver as Ihave ever learned walking in the woods.
And since we now live in a world where activities in one person's woods have adirect relationship on countries far away -- the disappearing rain forests insouthern Mexico and Hawaii and the changing weather everywhere, for example --we need to know one another. It is an imperative, not a luxury. What will werecognize? As the daughter of a Palestinian immigrant, steeped since earlychildhood in Palestinian folktales, I found it critical the older I grew toread Israeli Jewish writers too. I had to know how many links we had. WhenYehuda Amichai of Israel writes, "...the field needs it: wildpeace...,"he is talking about the same fields my ancestors wept over for years. I haveno doubt these cousins of the human race could learn to work in themtogether.
During the Gulf War, I carried poems from writers in Iraq into classrooms I wasvisiting. It seemed important to remember that there were real people in Iraq,real fears and hopes, real chimneys and children and shoes and bread. A friendwarned me, "You won't get away with it," but the exact opposite responseoccurred. Teachers said, "Where can we get more of these?" Did it matter thata third grader said, "I wonder what those little children in Iraq are thinkingabout today. I wonder if they slept at all last night." It mattered to me.Did it matter that high school girls ended up discussing the coldness of mediaeuphemisms -- "collateral damage" for innocent people dead, for example -- howthe television made everything seem somehow cold and distant, but the poemswritten in a personal human voice made that so-called enemy feel very close?That was the job of poems, we decided. To give us a sense ofothers' lives close up. Poems could be a zoom lens in a world of wide-anglesweeps. And the teachers at Hockaday School in Dallas said, "Do a book for us,okay? Give us a lot of voices from everywhere -- we'll be waiting."
I love that the word anthology comes from the Greek for flowergathering. We walk through the garden -- one plant stands out to oneperson, one vine to another. There are possibilities of choice. So I got towork on This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems From Around the World (FourWinds Press/Macmillan, 1992). I wrote letters to all the poets and translatorsI knew in many countries. "Send me poems appropriate for younger readers, butalso appealing to adults" -- I wanted a book that didn't condescend. I have avery slim appetite for the limericks and cutesy ditties some people toss outwhen you say "younger readers." Ever since second grade, when our ambitious,poetry-loving 75-year-old teacher had her entire class memorize William Blake'sSong of Innocence, I knew children were capable of more. She used tosay, "If you don't understand something, just turn it over and over in yourhead like a lozenge or a lemon drop." We did that, and it worked. We wereleft with lovely phrases in our memories, to savor as we grew older. We wereleft with a sense that words had something to give us.
And the poems came flying in, some stitched together at the top, some on thick,old-country paper, some fully illustrated with 20-page autobiographiesaccompanying. One fellow from a remote island asked if I could please nominatehim for the Nobel Prize. A poet in American Samoa thought she was supposed topay the permissions fee to me. Some of the poems, of course, I'dalready had and loved for years. Then I just had to track down their authorsor translators for permissions. No slim feat. The only day in my life I everdrank a glass of wine at 10 in the morning was one of those permission days.
Finally my trusty mailman Mario pounded on my door with a handful of exoticallystamped letters. "I can't stand it anymore," he said. "What are youdoing in there?" I love how Four Winds Press/Macmillan included some ofthe fabulous stamps as a detail in the front and back of the book. And I feeldeeply lucky that my generous, wonderful editor Virginia Duncan and herexcellent staff felt as enthusiastic about the book as I did. They even gaveit a blue marking ribbon. Some teachers have said, "I thought you had to bethe Bible to get a ribbon."
As will happen with collections, the poems ended up gathering themselves intosections that felt almost organic -- related to family, or words and silences,or losses, or human mysteries. The sky seemed to occur surprisingly often as auniversal reference point, which gave us the title. I loved receiving theautobiographical notes almost as much as the poems. An example from AmandaAizpuriete: "I'm raising 4 children and translating Emily Dickinson intoLatvian in my spare time." Or a note on Shuntaro Tanikawa by one of histranslators, Harold Wright: "He entered a poetry contest because he didn't wantto study for his college entrance exams and went on to become one of Japan'sbest-known contemporary poets." When Al Mahmud of Bangladesh describes hisearly life with poetry -- "Poetry was...carefully collected bird'seggs/fragrant grass, the runaway calf of a sad-looking young farm wife,/neatletters on secret writing pads in blue envelopes." -- he gives us a world wecan touch and smell and share. When Benilda Santos of the Phillipinesdescribes the elaborate, loving way her little son said goodbye to her when hewas in kindergarten and she left him at school, and the way he says goodbye toher now, years later -- "his standard reply's/a tight smile/an eyebrow'stwitch'or sometimes/the slightest of nods./Nothing remains of the oldgoodbyes..." -- I cry every time because I am a mother now, and because I wasalso a daughter saying goodbye in both ways, and because human beings need tobe reminded of themselves simply to see who we all are and how we fittogether.
I am happy to say that the collection This Same Sky was picked by theAmerican Library Association as a Notable Book, received numerous "Editor'sChoice" awards, the Jane Addams Award for Social Justice, and was called one ofthe Best Books of the Year for teenagers by the New York Public Libraries. Itwent into a third printing within one year of publication. And I am stillgetting letters from students and teachers in small towns and big cities,saying "Thanks for making my family larger." This all makes me happy becauseit suggests a real appetite for poetry still thriving in our rushed, modernsouls. It suggests the windows of the house are still open. One by one, inquiet corners, we will turn on a small light, read a poem, and feel our ownsoft wings spreading out into the dark. They will carry us. We have so manyplaces to go.
Naomi Shihab Nye lives in San Antonio. Her most recent work is Sitti'sSecrets (Four Winds Press/Macmillan, 1994).
