poetry pocket: kindness, naomi shihab nye

"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."

you can listen to Naomi Shihab Nye speak about her poem Kindness and her wonderful apporoach to Words in a wonderful episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast here:

“I just came back from Japan a month ago, and every classroom, I would just write on the board, “You are living in a poem.” And then I would write other things just relating to whatever we were doing in that class, but I found the students very intrigued by discussing that. “What do you mean, we’re living in a poem?” Or, “When? All the time, or just when someone talks about poetry?” And I’d say, “No; when you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another — that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.”

“I think that the essence of a kind of exchange is what poetry is interested in, too — the feeling that you’re not battered by thought in a poem, but you are sort of as if you’re riding the wave of thought; as if you’re allowing thought to enter. You’re shifting, you’re changing, you’re looking — you are in a sensibility that allows you that sort of mental, emotional, spiritual interaction with everything around you. I think it’s very, very helpful for mental health, actually.”

“You are living in a poem.”
- Naomi Shihab Nye

“I really wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to live without that apprehension that you could have a thought, shape a thought, change a thought, look at the words in a thought; that you could take a word and just use that word — I think I said this like 40 years ago in a poem — use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days, just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words. There’s a luxury in that kind of thinking about language and text, but it’s very basic, as well. It’s simple. It’s invisible. It doesn’t cost anything.”

“One thing I’ve tried to say to groups over the years, groups of all ages, is that writing things down — whatever you’re writing down, even if you’re writing something sad or hard — usually, you feel better after you do it. Somehow you’re given a sense of, OK, this mood, this sorrow I’m feeling, this trouble I’m in — I’ve given it shape. It’s got a shape on the page now. So I can stand back; I can look at it. I can think about it a little differently — what do I do now?”

“And very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. They always say, “I wrote things down. This isn’t quite finished. I need to work on it” — but they agree that it helped them see their experience, see what they were living. And that’s definitely a gift of writing that is above and beyond any sort of vocational — how much somebody publishes. It’s an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it.”

“My mother would say to me — her charge to me — “Be your best self.” And I would think, “Wow, what is that self? Where is it? Where is it tucked away? Where do I keep it when I’m not being it? And are you your best self? Is my teacher her best self?” And that was just something intriguing to me, that we had more than one self that we could operate out of. And I think one nice thing about writing is that you get to encounter, you get to meet these other selves, which continue on in you — your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes — and find some gracious way to have a community in there, inside, that would help you survive.”

on the possibilities of writing, Shihab Nye says:

“The more any of us writes, the more our words will “come to us.” If we trust in the words and their own mysterious relationship with one another, they will help us find things out… Consider the pleasure we feel when we go to a beach. The broad beach, the bigger air, the endless swish of movement and backdrop of sound. We feel uplifted, exhilarated. Writing regularly can help us feel that way too,”

recalling the wonderful warmth of her poem always bring a pencil:

““There will not be a test.
It does not have to be
a Number 2 pencil.

But there will be certain things —
the quiet flush of waves,
ripe scent of fish,
smooth ripple of the wind’s second name —
that prefer to be written about
in pencil.

It gives them more room
to move around”
- Naomi Shihab Nye

you can watch (and share, in kindness) a wonderful animation of Shihab Nye’s elevating poem here:

i am reminded, little voice, of Danusha Laméris’ Small Kindnesses:

of Mary Oliver, in Dogfish:

love,

ars poetica.