I’m Paul McDowell, for Michiana Chronicles, and I’m April Lidinsky. [Music: Simon and Garfunkel: “April, Come She Will”
April: Last autumn, to challenge my 56-year-old brain, and to bring companionable voices with me on my 12-minute commute, I began memorizing poems as I walked to work. Since April is National Poetry Month, I’ll share some of what I’ve “learned by heart”— a phrase I love, since poetry sits somewhere between the brain and the pulse of our imagination.
I began by memorizing song lyrics, like “Bread and Roses,” the labor and suffragist anthem about wanting the fullness of life, both bread and roses. I can now touch those affirming stanzas any time like a charm. And with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as my deadline, I memorized “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” grateful to harmonize with so many community members who made James Weldon Johnson’s lyrics echo and rise, “high as the listening skies,” in the lobby of the County-City Building before this year’s annual march.
Next, I learned some short poems, memorizing them stanza by stanza on the snowy trudge to campus, hoping I didn’t look unhinged as steam curled from my lips. Now, I can recite Eleanor Ross Taylor’s triumphant feminist poem, “Kitchen Fable,” in which a feminine fork endures years of clashes with a masculine knife, and lives to tell the tale. The poem ends wryly: “He dulled. He was a dull knife,/while she was, after all, a fork.”
Here’s one more favorite, which memory has made my own — Marge Pierce’s “To Be of Use,”which I share with graduating students as they begin what I hope will be a life of purposeful work. Piercy reminds us in her closing stanza,
The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.
For the past few years, our friends the McDowells have celebrated Poetry Month with a simple party idea: Gather with friends, and everyone brings a poem to read. I invited Paul McDowell to join me today. Paul, what poem did you bring?
Paul: April, I chose the poem, “What Do Poems Do?” by Brian Doyle. Shall I read it?
April: Please Do.
Paul:
I was, no kidding, a visiting writer in a kindergarten recently,
And the children asked me many wry and hilarious questions,
Among them is that your real nose? and can you write a book
About a ruffed grouse, please? But the one that pops back into
My mind this morning was what do poems do? Answers: swirl
Leaves along sidewalks suddenly when there is no wind. Open
Recalcitrant jars of honey. Be huckleberries in earliest January,
When berries are only a shivering idea on a bush. Be your dad
For a moment again, tall and amused and smelling like Sunday.
Be the awful wheeze of a kid with the flu. Remind you of what
You didn’t ever forget but only mislaid or misfiled. Be badgers,
Meteor showers, falcons, prayers, sneers, mayors, confessionals.
They are built to slide into you sideways. You have poetry slots
Where your gills used to be, when you lived inside your mother.
If you hold a poem right you can go back there. Find the handle.
Take a skitter of words and speak gently to them, and you’ll see.
April: Ah, that’s beautiful. Thank you so much. And I’m definitely re-growing my “poetry slots.” I think you should choose some poetry, set to music, for our closing. What do you think?
Paul: Well, when I think of poetry and music, I think of the great wordsmith Paul Simon, and there couldn’t be a more poetic song than “April, Come She Will.”
April: Sounds great. Why don’t we close with that?
Music: “April, Come She Will” by Simon and Garfunkel
