#20 summer shards

I don’t ever remember having fresh peas as a kid. I do remember my father describing being in a market in France in the early 50s when he and my mother were in art school. He said the moment when fresh peas arrived in the market it ignited a special kind frenzy.

I love growing peas. The early possibility of planting the seeds, the sprouts and tendrils, the first pods. But I find picking them requires a special kind of patience and looking. I have a chair I pull into the garden to sit on so I can slowly look for all the peas. Shelling peas requires the kind of serenity and attention to detail that reading poetry does. The effort is careful, full of breaks, but something happens beyond the utility of the task. I return again and again to another pod, splitting each one, admiring the nestled peas, and dropping the fresh green bit into the bowl.

Whether or not we are seeing the tide of poetry’s popularity ebb or flow seems to be somewhat up in the air. But what I do know, and what I am most intimately familiar with, is that poetry helps, that on days when I feel overwhelmingly bullied by the ongoing barrage of vitriol and pain in the world, there is a very real and significant joy that occurs when I return to, or discover, a really good poem. But explaining why it matters, or how it helps, is difficult. It’s like trying to explain to someone why walking into a stand of trees helps, or why going to the water helps, or seeing that one kind burst of blue sky among the terrifying scrapers helps.

Perhaps why it matters, how it lifts us, and why some of us return to it again and again is, unlike any other form of writing, poetry has breath built right into it, thanks to the line break, and the stanza. “And here we breathe a little,” the poem says, “and here we breathe a lot.” Right now, as a society, I think we need that breath. That necessary pause that allows for our own wrecked little selves to enter the poem, or even just return to the room we are presently in, that particular moment is where the real brilliance of great poetry happens.

–Ada Limón, Why Poetry Helps