it's national poetry day
so naturally i am going to fangirl
i’m in the tub fighting off a cold, thinking about poetry. i’m always thinking about poetry. especially when i feel down physically or mentally but also, when i feel elated. or when i want to connect with myself and others on a profound and often intangible level!
you could say that pretty much at all time, poetry is there beside me. like a welcomed haunting, a twin, or a smile on the verge of a laugh.
i wonder who wrote or recited the very first poem - if they even knew what they were creating. i imagine it was likely pure raw instinct, the way a baby caribou stands up just moments after it is born.
Poetry as an oral art form likely predates written text.[1] The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering oral history, genealogy, and law. Poetry is often closely related to musical traditions, and the earliest poetry exists in the form of hymns (such as Hymn to the Death of Tammuz), and other types of song such as chants. As such, poetry is often a verbal art.
i want to share some of my favourite poets with you. the real list is as long as the number of beetle species that exist on Earth, but i’ll share just a few below :)
Margaret Atwood is my favourite writer - and did you know she’s Canadian? [we Canadians love to say that haha]. she also has a Substack publication called In the Writing Burrow if you want to follow along!
Atwood’s most recent poetry collection titled Dearly is one of my favourite books, along with her impressive array of [often dystopian] novels, essays and short stories.
[you fit into me]
.
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
.
Margaret Atwood
i’m a fawning fangirl of Sylvia Plath, who we lost too soon. someone i would have loved to have met for tea, or a walk through the countryside. i enjoyed reading her only novel, the Bell Jar and i hope to read Plath’s Unabridged Journals this winter when the temperature hits negative thirty celsius and i am swaddled in blush-toned blankets.
Edge
.
The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
.
Sylvia Plath
i also want to mention Ocean Vuong, because his poetry book titled Time is a Mother rearranged my chemical makeup. Vuong was born in Vietnam and raised in the USA, and he’s written a novel as well as various poetry collections.
Beautiful Short Loser [excerpt]
.
Stand back, I’m a loser on a winning streak.
I got your wedding dress on backward, playing air guitar in these streets.
I taste my mouth the most & what a blessing.
The most normal things about me are my shoulders. You’ve been warned.
Where I’m from it’s only midnight for a second
& the trees look like grandfathers laughing in the rain.
.
Ocean Vuong
Savannah Brown is a poet i came across on YouTube approximately one week into the pandemic. her poetry videos brought me so much peace, whimsy and inspiration during a really confusing time. her website is super cool too, especially the garden part of it.
Brown also founded my favourite poetry prompt frenzy which spans the duration of April, called Escapril! my favourite poetry collection of hers is the most recent one, titled closer baby closer - i highly recommend reading it.
Poet (Derogatory)
.
He likes my poems because 'it's interesting to see
how differently we experience the same moment'
which was a nice way to say I'm always overreacting.
Meanwhile I hate poems and myself for writing them,
these monologues delivered in riddle by a troll
who guards the bridge to a place no one even wants
to go, like hell, or an open mic, where a further
coalition of trolls guard further bridges.
I try so hard.
Spend hours on the word tongue, a comma.
Look at this experimental maze intended
for an animal both winged
and extinct. And don't get me started
on love; my term of endearment, today I tried
to tell you you're the chosen one in a long-dead
language, wrote an instruction manual for disabling
an atom bomb in cipher, blasted slow-growing peonies
into space to move them closer to the sun.
Why can't I just say it straight?
I'm so in love with you it makes me want to die.
Understand.
Anyway, we know words always win. I'm sorry,
another lie. Sometimes they win but often
they lose. This is the truth: I have nothing else.
.
Savannah Brown
my dad gifted me this poetry book called Obit by Victoria Chang and i got really high before i read it. it was life-changing. each poem in the collection takes the form of an obituary in some way or another, and i found the entire book incredibly comforting to read, especially after the loss of my stepfather. remarkable all around; i look forward to reading more of Chang’s work in the future.
My Mother’s Teeth
.
My Mother’s Teeth—died twice, once in
1965, all pulled out from gum disease.
Once again on August 3, 2015. The
fake teeth sit in a box in the garage.
When she died, I touched them, smelled
them, thought I heard a whimper. I
shoved the teeth into my mouth. But
having two sets of teeth only made me
hungrier. When my mother died, I saw
myself in the mirror, her words around
my mouth, like powder from a donut.
Her last words were in English. She
asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether
her last thought was in Chinese. I
wonder what her last thought was. I
used to think that a dead person’s
words die with them. Now I know that
they scatter, looking for meaning to
attach to like a scent. My mother used
to collect orange blossoms in a small
shallow bowl. I pass the tree each
spring. I always knew that grief was
something I could smell. But I didn’t
know that it’s not actually a noun but a
verb. That it moves.
.
Victoria Chang
and of course i can’t forget to mention Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in 2022. i’ve read and immensely enjoyed many of her collections, but i think my favourite is The Carrying. it shattered me in the best way - i feel like i know her now, through the pages of this book.
i actually used a couple of lines from Limón’s poem “Dead Stars” as the epigraph for chapter two in my own poetry collection, mortal atlas. i’ll share the full poem below:
Dead Stars
.
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
.
Ada Limón
if you’ve read this far, you must love poetry! hehehe 🫀 what a way to celebrate national poetry day, thinking of and honouring our favourite poets [of which i have many more, by the way]. so many of you that i speak with almost daily here on Substack, as well as over on the other apps! you’re all incredible.
the poetry community is one that i am honoured to be part of, something that keeps me going when the grind of daily life and society gets a little too loud. a little too harsh.. something soft and feral in a way that i cannot get enough of.
earlier today on Instagram, i shared a roundup of poems that i’d written over the past 2 or 3 years about being a poet. i’m going to leave them below as a little treat, incase you feel like gobbling up even more poems! maybe you are full. maybe you’ll relate to one or two. either way, thanks for being here <3
who are some of your favourite poets? and poems? what are things you love about poetry in general? what do you want to learn more about?
i have a few other poetry-related posts on Substack, if you’re keen to dive into the realm of “how to” when it comes to writing poetry and self-publishing a collection :) i share my original poems frequently here as well!
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i’m forever grateful that you are here, choosing to read my words <3
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A great selection - thank you for sharing them. Some I knew some i didn't.
Thank you for sharing these amazing poets/poems Sonja!
I enjoyed Ocean’s in particular ❤️
Also…I didn’t know it was National Poetry Day 🥹