Author: Tania Runyan

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Reading Poems is Good “Mom Medicine”—Especially When the Kids Are Marching

 

The other night, I took Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems and a glass of my favorite drink upstairs to the bathtub while my kids hung out in the family room with their dad. I call this combo my “mom medicine.”

I started off with some of Bishop’s well-known pieces, like “Filling Station,” “The Armadillo,” and “One Art,” inhaling some of the beautiful, witty lines I hadn’t visited since college. Then I flipped back to a section titled, “Poems Written in Youth ”– poems, according to the volume’s Publisher’s Note, that Bishop “would not have reprinted. . .for she was too severe a critic of her own work.”

Of course, that note made me want to read them all the more.

I began to recite some of the lines Bishop wrote when she was a teenager (still exquisite, of course). Then the marching began.

Two weeks ago, I had taken my middle schooler to see Mockingjay, Part 1. At one point in the movie, Katniss, the main character played by Jennifer Lawrence, sings the haunting “The Hanging Tree.” My daughter sat transfixed. And she wasn’t alone. The song quickly moved up the charts upon the movie’s release.

That night, my daughter taught the song to her younger sister, and now, to my annoyance, the two were singing the dirge-like tune quite aggressively, marching throughout the house. Their pounding feet sent waves through my bathwater.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
They strung up a man
They say who murdered three.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where the dead man called out
For his love to flee.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met at midnight
In the hanging tree.

And so forth, for several more stanzas. It is a disturbingly beautiful song, but now I wanted to keep reading the Bishop poem open before me:

To a Tree

Oh, tree outside my window, we are kin,
For you ask nothing of a friend but this:
To lean against the window and peer in
And watch me move about! Sufficient bliss

For me, who stand behind its framework stout,
Full of my tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,
To lean against the window and peer out,
Admiring infinites’mal leaves.

Of course. I was getting distracted reading a young girl’s poem about a tree because my two young girls were marching and singing about a tree.

But then the connections began to hit me. One scene is haunting and one comforting; however, both capture the intimacy and mystery of our relationships with trees–how the young are drawn to them irresistibly as places to love, grieve, and imagine. As places to find oneself or lose oneself. Trees are our mirror selves of growth, change, and loss, limb by swaying limb.

I won’t get into any mystical theories about how or why these poetic connections happen, but they seem to happen for me all the time. Most people would probably say they are coincidences. Fine. I can accept that. But even with coincidences, why not have a little fun?

Pick up a book of poems, and start reading them aloud. Don’t read with a goal to “get” the poems. Enjoy the sounds and images and see how they touch on the events, experiences, and feelings in your own life. Write these connections in the margins. They may change tomorrow or the next day. No matter. See how the poems speak to and reinforce your day now. These connections will make the poems more real. And perhaps your life.

Reading poetry. Strange things do happen here. And that is sufficient bliss for me.

This post is a modified reprint of a post by Tania Runyan that first appeared at How to Read a Poem. Photo by Kelle Sauer.

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A Little Mom Music—from D.H. Lawrence

A poem can sing to you, even if you don’t totally “get” it or enjoy every line.

“Piano,” by D.H. Lawrence, is not one of my overall favorite poems. It’s not a bad poem, of course, and I can’t pretend to even approach Lawrence’s levels of literary influence in my lifetime. However, references to “weeping” and “floods of remembrance” don’t grip me in the same way as precise, sensory details that invite me weep and remember. Which is precisely why this poem sticks with me.

In the first stanza, a woman’s voice seeps through the dusk like the soft, remaining glow of light. The speaker, drawn into this beauty, experiences an out-of-body memory and imagines himself as a child many years ago.

The next two lines are what grab me:

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings/And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

What I love about this memory is the full sensory appeal of it, especially the sense of touch. I feel the vibration of the strings under the piano–both the “boom” of the bass notes and the strains of the “tingling strings,” words whose similar sounds cause the music to tremble under my own skin. The tender detail of the child “pressing the small, poised feet” of his mother is just unusual enough to make the scene real to me. Specific is universal. I can imagine a child touching his mother’s feet because of my own children, who affectionately tug my sweater sashes, knee me in the butt, or whack my head with coloring books.

In Everything That Makes You Mom, author Laura Lynn Brown asks readers to recall memories of their mothers in specific situations, such as concocting treats in the kitchen, driving, playing, or tending plants. By imagining and recording these scenes in writing (remember, imagining is image-ing), readers not only reward themselves with rich pictures from the past but can give their mothers the invaluable gift of showing how they noticed things all those years.

My mom is not a musician. She’s creative, yes, but as a master quilter, builder of Victorian dollhouses, and any other task requiring an eye for detailed design. The images of my mother embroidering calico brown wedding rings and laying tiny shingles one by one on gabled roofs will never leave me. But these wonders were wrought in her own private moments as I stood in the background. We did share some important times together, however. And they did not take place alongside a musical instrument, easel, or Great American Novel.

Every Saturday night, during my childhood in the late 70s and early 80s, my mom and I watched The Love Boat while sharing a one-pound bag of M&Ms. We weren’t the snuggliest family in the world, but once a week we put our feet up, threw comforters over our legs, and huddled with a bag of candy between us.

Of course The Love Boat was not a masterpiece. Plot lines were predictable and corny. Charo was a frequent guest star. But it was “our thing.” In fact, one year my mom gave me a sterling silver heart necklace to commemorate our sweet ritual, and even when I returned from college on the weekends, years after The Love Boat went off the air, I would find a large bag of M&Ms awaiting me on my bed.

As a mother, I wonder what close moments my children will remember. Hugging my son as I walk into his first-grade classroom as a volunteer? Squeezing through clothing racks with my oldest daughter at the mall? Lying next to my middle daughter as she paints watercolor flowers while on her bed? (Yep. I’ve decided to let her paint in bed.)

A whole poem can capture you, each word catching more and more of your breath until you’re dizzy with wonder. Sometimes just part of a poem does it: a stanza, line, or word. This is what “Piano” has done for me, releasing my own, okay, I’ll say it—flood of memories.

Give every poem a chance to explore you. You’ll never know what will sing.

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

—D.H. Lawrence

 

Photo by Kelle Sauer. This post is a modified reprint of a post by Tania Runyan that first ran at How to Read a Poem.

 

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3 Tricky Ways to Become a Mom on More Poetry

Poetry makes you a better writer, a better reader, and it fills a space in your life that nothing else can in quite the same way that poetry does.

I know this. But I’ve often struggled with formulating a good poetry reading plan. I’ve watched stacks of poetry collections teeter on my nightstand. I’ve stood frozen in bliss/terror at the hundreds of colorful volumes in independent bookstores. I’ve even struggled with the guilt of not having read “enough” of the classics.

For this school year, however, I’ve developed a plan, and it’s one you can easily adopt for yourself if you wish. These three cool tips for bolstering your poetry reading can provide you with some structure, a sense of accomplishment and, above all, the wonder and beauty of hundreds of new poems in your life.

1) Go all-out fangirl, with one classic poet per season.

Carolyn Forche, a wonderful poet whose works include the haunting collection The Country Between Us and the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, suggests choosing one pre-WWII poet per season and immersing yourself in his or her work.

You can also absorb any other information you’re able to find, such as letters, biographies, and interviews. She suggests keeping these materials at your bedside or favorite chair–wherever you normally do your reading–and picking up the work whenever you can.

This approach has been liberating for me. At the end of the summer, my nightstand and bedroom floor were piled with books. Many people welcome this “problem,” but for me, the image was a daily reminder of the time I lacked, even a source of guilt.

So I took the books down to the basement office, shelved the ones I suspected I wouldn’t get to for awhile and built a “to-read” stack that would remain safely out of my daily line of vision.

Then I ordered Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems.

While studying creative writing as an undergraduate, I read a number of the famous Stevens poems, such as “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emporer of Ice Cream,” and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In my book How to Read a Poem, I feature one of his earlier poems, “The Snow Man,” as an example of expert imagery. But I’ve always known I had so much more to learn from Stevens. Personally, I’ve been interested in this insurance executive/poet because, like me, he lives an “atypical” poet’s life.

These days, I keep just one thick book on my nightstand. I take a few moments each night to enter the mysterious rooms of these Stevens poems, savoring lines like “But on the first-found weed/She scuds the glitters” or “Fill your black hull/With white moonlight.”

Even if I don’t really “get” the poem (one reason, I believe, I avoided Stevens for so long), I allow the light to shine through and the words to hum until I feel the poem in my bones.

2) Remodel your bathroom–with poetry

Forche also recommends staying in tune with contemporary poetry by always keeping a current volume in one of those other popular reading spots, the bathroom. The choices are endless. Where do you begin?

Word of mouth is always my favorite way to pick up ideas for new collections of poetry. When I start to recognize a fresh poet’s name from Facebook or Twitter, I pay attention. Reviews from Tweetspeak Poetry or The Poetry Foundation also abound with interesting titles.

Sometimes, the best approach is to just pick a book you’ve never heard of from the poetry shelf at your library or local bookstore. That’s how I discovered Li-Young Lee and Sharon Olds as a college student–I closed my eyes and picked.

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve had Andrew Hudgins’s selected poems, American Rendering, in my upstairs bathroom. In fact, it was the first book I grabbed from that basement “to-read” pile. I’ve always enjoyed his work, including Tree, which I use to teach line breaks in How to Write a Poem. This book includes many of his best poems from six volumes that cover a twenty-five year period. His voice is fresh, dark, and funny, but I often get through just one stanza at a time.

“If you can’t finish a slim volume of poetry per week,” Forche says, “you’re not spending enough time in the bathroom.”

Duly noted.

3) Get poetic, by email

You can subscribe to a poetry delivery service that sends daily poems to your inbox. I suggest Every Day Poems, sponsored by Tweetspeak Poetry. Poets and editors lovingly curate a variety of classic and contemporary poems paired with beautiful artwork, exploring a monthly theme.

Consider the daily poem as important as any of your other emails and take a few minutes to breathe and read (and find a little inbox mom peace!). With 260 weekdays in the year, you will have read the equivalent of several more books of poetry.

 

Photo by Kelle Sauer. This is a modified reprint of an article by Tania Runyan that first ran on How to Read a Poem.