Poetry by JC Snyder

And here I am over Colorado, racing towards Vegas,
and the cracked red lands, and the lights of a buzzing Oasis,
I brought along Kerouac.
He’s made me desperate
to take off and write that way, and live that way, hopping
rides with wild abandon.

Outside clouds pile high on each other, and here I sit,
smashed in the middle,
bursting at the thought:

I read this book 14 years ago
when the country was still unknown to me,
all marked for treasure, Xs and lines and potential on paper.

This was before the country’s heartache,

before constant notifications and
gel manicures, sushi, home ownership, broken marriages,
before GPS and Instagram,

before terrorism even. I was an open road.

Stretching out, clouds settle in, thinning like hair,

I want to visit the Omaha of my grandfather, the wild and raw,
Model T dripping oil, hissing in protest.
He made it to the Hoover Dam and camped out,
he slept under stars that don’t exist anymore because
we’ve swiped them away.

Without a road taken, Vegas appears.

When I say the word “poetry”, what comes to mind?

Maybe it’s the beautiful simplicity of Japanese haiku. Perhaps it’s more the stress of Chaucer, Dickinson, or Shakespeare. Or maybe it’s a sentimental card you received once; “roses are red, violets are blue….”

I’ve found that too many times, poetry is an instinctive shudder. Which is just to say – poetry is ruined for a lot of people in school and they never look back.

Well, my goal is to convince you to try poetry again because it’s worthwhile for your career and life, no matter who you are, right at this very moment.

We all have a creative side (even you!). The trouble is that most of us don’t cultivate it. Mostly, we’re just too busy.

But poetry fits a busy lifestyle better than most arts.

And the reason for adding poetry to your life isn’t just to cultivate your artistic side (which it will) – it’s also to improve your leadership, your communication, and your overall ability to relate to the world.

Poetry requires a cultivation of patience. It also demands self-reflection and exploration, both of which might not be on your daily to-do but are vital skills to hone. It’s my belief that practicing the art of poetry improves these two areas of our lives, which in turn, improves our ability to perform at work.

If I’ve piqued your interest, let’s start with how to write your first poem. With each step, we’ll see how it also relates to work performance. Like yoga, the benefits are in the practice of it… so don’t be shy to try!

(more…)

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Patrick Phillips lives in Brooklyn, but in every city, town and village, and at every crossroads, there’s an old guitar. Here’s one from Elegy for a Broken Machine, a fine book from Alfred A. Knopf.

The Guitar

Oh how I loved this week’s column. Had to share! Enjoy~

American Life in Poetry: Column 537

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

One of the first uses of language must surely have been to tell others what happened beyond the firelight, out in the forest. And poems that do just that seem wonderfully natural and human to me. Here’s Anya Krugovoy Silver telling us something that happened far from home. She lives and teaches in Georgia.

Doing Laundry In Budapest

The dryer, uniform and squat as a biscuit tin,
came to life and turned on me its insect eye.
My t-shirts and underwear crackled and leapt.
I was a tourist there; I didn’t speak the language.
My shoulders covered themselves up in churches,
my tongue soothed its burn with slices of pickle.
More I don’t remember: only, weekends now
when I stand in the kitchen, sorting sweat pants
and pairing socks, I remember the afternoon
I did my laundry in Budapest, where the sidewalks
bloomed with embroidered linen, where money
wasn’t permitted to leave the country.
When I close my eyes, I recall that spinning,
then a woman, with nothing else to sell,
pressing wilted flowers in my hands.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2014 by Anya Krugovoy Silver, “Doing Laundry in Budapest,” from I Watched You Disappear: Poems, (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Anya Krugovoy Silver and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Here’s the beautiful thing about
this dream we live together across
time, space, generations
(you do realize it’s all a dream, don’t you?)
we hold souvenirs from our trips and don’t realize it:
a ring that i wear,
and you wore, and she wore,
before another wore,
i don’t know what it looked like but
i assume we all have the same
long fingers thin to set it.
a framed sketch of Young Eve,
an antique chair (i reupholstered in green)
how i feel us all sit down at once
with our dreamy books perfuming our small room,
together slipping away in revelries
specific to our own moments in time.
isn’t it amazing to travel infinitely this way,
and others will join us later too,
Come along now~

A flutter of teases
shivering up the spine of each leaf
until the whole shakes like a belly laugh.

(You can’t force someone to see it; you
have to wait until they make time to
discover their own)

if I were a tree in the wind,
I’d giggle every time my skirt lifted at the ends,
shimmy, shimmy down to roots.

You had told him,
don’t mow that part of the lawn
let it stay pretty a little while longer.

Magnolia blossoms spread out like
a soft pink tree skirt,
verdant grass now growing older, taller.

You squealed joyfully when the wind blew:
us women on rocking chairs
and more petals like snow falling, fresh.