Against Breaking - Booknotes

 

xvi - "educators working overtime to inspire young people to write about this planet."

xviii - "I hope you feel invited into the room, the large room we all must create together ,the room where we all must work hard to save what matters."

3 Any time I begin to write anything these days ... I ask myself, Do I want to break something, or do I want to mend something? or simply try to carve out a small place to breathe?  [these are all purposes of writing 

7 - I came to realize... people hunry for poetry, language, and connection...

When I first begna to serve in the role of Poet Laureate, I though my ob was to bring poetry to the people, but that's not what happened. The offering was not central to my experience; instead, it was the receiving.  

 13 - on writing secret poems.. "There is power in making private poems. Aren't we all walking around with some unsaid pain, or some uncelebrated wonder? Aren't we all trying to find a place for our rage and despair?"

the act of writing "make you pay attention"

17 If you've ever wondered what someone was thinking or how thye reembered a certain event or how images unfolded in their minds, and what the inside of their thought patterns might look like... then yo've wondered what their poems might look like.

21 We can inhabit each other's lives just by reading a poem aloud. It's this intimacy that prevents us from being alone.

24 - Adam Zagajewski's poem - try to praise the mutilated world

27 Is there rage? Yes. Is there room for wonder? Yes.  

28 Langston Hughes

Tired

I am so tired of waiting,

Aren't you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two --

And see what worms are eating

At the rind.

 

31 Poetry in Motion - in NY subways

Robert Creeley - "Return"

"Enough for now to be here, and/ To know my door is one of these." 

32 Emma Lazarus

The New Colossus"

 

35 I was tired and feeling a little bruised by the world.... this is what we are supposed to do: praise, praise, praise

 

36 Ross Gay " Sorrow is Not My Name"

there are, on this planet alone, something like two

million naturally occurring sweet things,

some with names so generous as to kick

the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,

stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks

at the market. Think of that. 

 

I've argued for most of my life that poetry is powerful in part because it exists in the questions and holds no answers. It's the opposite of a polemic, or a prescription; instead, it's an interrogation of the world and one's place within it.  That said, even though it doesn't hold answers, perhaps it is an answer. 

 

37 Audre Lorde - If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

 

Poetry can help prevent us from being eaten alive, because if we write it, we are allowed to reframe the narrative, recenter the truth, and reimagine a different type of future. If we are readers of poetry, we can search for the poems that allow us to feel not just seen but beheld. The right poem can make us recommit to the world. 

 

41 Sometimes, all poetry offers me is possibility. When the world says things are impossible, poetry says, Is that true? What if the new story starts here? What if the center is not where you think it is?

 

June Jordan: We are the ones we have been waiting for.

 

46 The poetic life offers a different relationship with the world, one that is trembling with feeling and music and attention. It can change you and hold you and reunite you with your own humanity.

 

Listen, I am not saying you have to love every poem I love, or love the poetry that I write. But please love something. In fact, that's what poetry -- secret or shared -- can give us: a chance to write toward what we love, to name it, to sing our sorrow so it does not break us, to brea witness to this moment in time, to become stronger, to retrain our minds towards what's good in this world, to wha'ts good in us.