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
Wyatt Townley (former Kansas Poet Laureate) and I are thinking through the possibility of doing something together so I’ll work on that.
Mary Jo Fresch and I are into the final tweaks before our book goes to the printer so I’ll work on that.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 