SJCPL Blog

To this day, I remember clearly even such details as the layout of the shelves in the bookstore. It was August of 1992, and I was taking courses in a summer session at Tufts University outside Boston. I’m a sucker for university bookstores; I’m always fascinated to see what books are required reading in college classes. On this particular day, the textbooks for a poetry course in Tufts’ English Department caught my eye. One of the required texts was a slim volume of poems, Of Gravity & Angels, by Jane Hirshfield, of whom I hadn’t heard. The cover art was a gorgeous Japanese-style drawing. Somehow, it called to me, and I purchased it. What a revelation! Hirshfield’s poems are lyrical yet earthy in language and topic. They seemed magical to me.

As recently as two years before, I probably would not even have noticed a book of poetry. In 1991, in my final semester of college, I had taken my first poetry class. (If I’d taken it in my first year, I think I would have changed majors from biology to English!) Professor Gelpi was wonderfully, inspirationally passionate about poetry. He’d read us poems as he paced back and forth in front of the class, altering his tone and emphasis and gesturing as appropriate to the poem. I can still hear his voice intoning the rounded syllables of William Carlos Williams‘ “The Red Wheelbarrow” and Wallace Stevens‘ “The Idea of Order at Key West.”

The course was my first real introduction to poetry. Before the class, the only interest I’d had in poetry was memorizing Dr. Seuss‘ The Lorax and reading a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that my father gave me one year for my birthday. I did enjoy Emily Dickinson’s work–so much so, in fact, that in my college poetry class my term paper was something obscure like “The Use of the Hyphen in Emily Dickinson’s Poems.” But I had never had enough interest to read poetry on my own.

After taking Prof. Gelpi’s class, though, I felt competent to tackle poetry and read it for pleasure. Since then I’ve often sought out and read an eclectic assortment of poetry, from popular favorites to more obscure works. My bookshelf holds volumes ranging from Elizabeth Bishop to Dickinson to T. S. Eliot to Robert Frost to Hirshfield to Philip Larkin to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Anne Porter to William Shakespeare to Ntozake Shange to Walt Whitman. Several anthologies hold additional beloved works.

Looking through these volumes, I find I have dog-eared the pages holding my favorite poems. Let me recommend some particular favorites (many of which can be found in the 1983 Norton Anthology of Poetry or the compilation First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems that Captivated and Inspired Them):

• Elizabeth Bishop’s “January First” (”You were beside me, / still asleep. / The day had invented you / but you hadn’t yet accepted / being invented by the day.”)
• e. e. cummings‘ “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond”
• Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers”
• T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• Many of Robert Frost’s poems, which conjure up the rocky New England landscape so well: “Mending Wall” (”Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”), “The Road Not Taken” (”Two roads diverged in a wood, and I– / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference”), and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (”The woods are lovely, dark and deep / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep”)
• Anything by Jane Hirshfield, particularly any poem from Of Gravity & Angels
• Philip Larkin’s “I have started to say” (”I have started to say / ‘A quarter of a century’ / Or ‘thirty years back’ / About my own life”)
• On the Fourth of July, I always make time to read Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” It is historically inaccurate, but I can’t hear the opening lines (”Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”) without a thrill of excitement.
• Anne Porter’s “The First of May” (”Now the smallest creatures, who do not know they have names, / In fields of pure sunshine open themselves and sing”)
• “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West,” by Wallace Stevens
• William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just to Say”

So take the advice of Shakespeare in his famous Sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.” To paraphrase in an unintended way: no excuses — get into the spirit of National Poetry Month by finding and reading poems you love!