Getting it right

Hi everyone,

Yesterday when WYATT TOWNLEY’s guest column was printed (and shared with you) something had happened in the layout process and her poem was printed in double space, all one stanza. We’re hoping to get the correction made, but if can we can’t, I’m printing the column here, with the poem as it should be. I’m very sorry for the error.

WYATT TOWNLEY
Poetry from Daily Life

My guest today is Kansas Poet Laureate Emerita, Wyatt Townley, who lives in eastern Kansas. Wyatt has written poetry since childhood, from free verse to villanelles to pattern poems. Favorite book projects include The Afterlives of Trees and most recently, Rewriting the Body. Wyatt is tall for her age, but short beside her 7-foot husband. She loves to look up—at her husband, at weather, at stars. Her (no longer) secret mission was to be the first poet in space. ~ David L. Harrison

TO YOUR HEALTH 

Some readers feel intimidated by poetry. Maybe somewhere along the way, the emphasis was placed on what a poem means. What a poem “means” is the consolation prize. Besides, nobody knows—not the teacher, not the reader, sometimes not even the author.  

What matters is not what a poem means, but what it does to us, where it takes us, and how it moves us. One of poetry’s best features is the element of surprise—the turn with a new view around its corner.  

When you find a poem that helps you, I invite you to commit it to memory. That way you can give it to others (and to yourself!) for the rest of your life. Memorizing is like any muscle that grows stronger with use—and the cognitive benefits are well documented.

My own practice is to laminate a half-dozen copies of a poem and spread them around the house wherever I tend to land: favorite chair, bedside table, back pocket. I take them on the trails and walk to their rhythms. It’s like sipping a wonderful drink, just a line or a couplet at a time, repeated until integrated. Knowing a poem by heart is a gift that keeps on giving. 

At breakfast in our house, we launch the day by reading a poem aloud—a daily vitamin.  
Here’s the first poem of my latest book, Rewriting the Body.

IT’S EASY 

to enter the room 
of this poem. Less 
so to stay. But do  

until this line 
ends and begins 
again, dropping     

to the next stanza.   
If you’re still here,
have a drink, have 

the run of the place,
whatever you like 
in the right glass. Clink!  

And the view—take 
your pick:  an ocean 
under a stick of moon, 

or this one I’ve got
at the edge of the woods
in the softest rain 

that hangs off the undersides 
of branches, each drop 
holding a world     								      

about to fall. And when 
it does, it isn’t   
gone. Inside this book

are other rooms,
a whole house curled 
inside a tree. I’ll leave 

the porchlight on.  


Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita, Wyatt has published six books. Her poetry has appeared in venues as diverse as The Paris Review and Scientific American. She was commissioned to write poems that now hang in libraries from the new Lenexa City Center Library in Kansas to the Space Telescope Science Institute Library in Baltimore, home of the Hubble.  www.WyattTownley.com