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Jan Bosman: Poetry can shine a little light

Amanda Gorman became a household name after the 22-year-old recited her original poem, “The Hill We Climb,” at the January 2021 inauguration of President Joseph Biden. Talk show hosts, news commentators and ordinary folk were impressed by the performance of the youngest poet ever to be part of the ceremony. Suddenly, poetry had a face and a yellow coat.

During April, National Poetry Month, an event organized in 1996 to celebrate poetry in all its forms, poets get all giddy about the spotlight. They schedule workshops and readings; they submit poems and columns to newspapers. But I always wonder what National Poetry Month means to you, the general reader of print.

I wonder if any poem has been a balm for you during the year’s pandemic and political upheaval. I wonder if poems have served to relieve your stress as much as jumping into icy Lake Michigan has calmed Chicagoan Dan O’Connor every day during the past eight months.

I wonder if a poem has ever chased you and yelled, “Listen to me!” And when you screamed, “I don’t get poetry,” that poem shouted back, “You just haven’t found the poem that grabs you by the heart and won’t let go!”

For two of my friends who invited a poem or two into their lives, here’s how it worked. Nancy, a northern Wisconsin muse, said, “I keep poetry books from small presses and favorite poets in each room (even bathrooms). Reading a selected poem brings daily joy, especially from ones with subtle humor.”

Andree agreed. “Like anything else that lifts a person out of the mundane into a space outside time, yes, poetry helped me get through this strange year. Poetry is a kind of ‘Beam-me-up-Scotty’ experience, so it was a place I went where COVID-19 didn’t exist – just words, their lovely rhythms and sounds.”

My personal discovery was the philosophy and poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye. I recommend to you her work and YouTube videos. She has said, “Poetry doesn’t have to solve problems. It just has to shine a little light.” With that in mind, here are some lines from my new favorite poem, “Kindness”:

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.”

I wrote eight poems this year, among them “Something’s Up,” “The New Normal,” and “Checking My Temperature.” I tuned up a sonnet and participated in poetry workshops on Zoom with the Atrocious Poets. Also, I actively sought verse that would shine a little light.

In my quest, I found “The Thing Is,” written by Ellen Bass. This portion of her short poem speaks to all of us about the miasma of the past year:

“The thing is

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands.

. . .

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.”

In June 2020, Alice Quinn, former poetry editor for The New Yorker, compiled an anthology titled “Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic.” This book includes reflections on body bags in refrigerated trucks, Mardi Gras super-spreading floats, and the exploding price of toilet paper and milk. In her poem, “The End of Poetry,” contributor Ada Limon pleads, “enough of longing, enough of can you hear me? enough of can you see me? enough of looking inward. I’m asking you to touch me.”

So, the truth dangles like a fly-speckled bulb on a frayed cord: Poetry cannot solve problems. Poetry can only shine a light – and often not a floodlight. Sometimes, the light is just a beam from the poetry book in your own hand.

“When day comes,

we step out of the shade

aflame and unafraid.

The new dawn blooms

as we free it.

For there is always light

if only we’re brave enough to see it.”

From “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman

• Jan Bosman of Woodstock taught English and business for 32 years, the last 22 at Johnsburg High School. She also is a published essayist and poet and a member of the Atrocious Poets of McHenry County.