7 Poets for a Little Midsummer Perspective on Parenting

by ParentCo. July 26, 2017

You’ve probably already got your mysteries and steamy beach reads stacked up and dog-eared somewhere, so this is a different sort of list. Deft, light, and bite-sized, yet also swirly and plunging and packed with the potential for getting very lost indeed, the work of these poets can pluck you out of your life and plop you back again in a matter of moments. But don’t let the brevity of poetry fool you. A few lines can feel like journeys into another mind, space, and time. Here are seven volumes to Calgon-take-you-away while your kids squeal in the sprinkler (before getting too grassy), contentedly lick popsicles on the porch (before complaining of sticky fingers), or make like little bulldozers on the beach (before realizing they have a shovelful of sand suspended in the crotch of their bathing suits).

Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins This is classic Billy Collins: funny, ironic, and deceptively simple. It’s poetry that pokes fun at the human condition, while also reveling in it – which is basically what parents need to do if they hope to stay sane. Here’s an excerpt from the poem “Days”:

Through the calm eye of the window everything is in its place but so precariously this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it, all the days of the past stacked high like the impossible tower of dishes entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself perched on the top of a tall ladder hoping to add one more. Just another Wednesday,

you whisper, then holding your breath, place this cup on yesterday’s saucer without the slightest clink.

Things Are Happening

by Joshua Beckman I love this poet so much. Dip in anywhere and you’re walking through a maze of close encounters of the hyper-observant kind. Tenderly accessible yet also dramatic, Beckman’s poems bring even the most forgettable moments into high relief. Here’s an excerpt from the poem “My Story”:

On a day like today (sunny but mild) anyone could suggest to you a better way of living without making you mad. What does your story have to do with my life is something that a lot of people wonder. Not everyone has dropped their child. Not everyone has abandoned hope of forgiveness for a tiny speck of a thing they were once guilty of. And not everyone has focused all of their usable energy on a task as basic as buying an ice cream cone.

Dream Work

by Mary Oliver Hayden Carruth calls Oliver’s poems “wonderingly perceptive” and a “meditation on the impossibilities of what we call lives, and on the gratifications of change.” Yes, to all those juicy things. Also, Oliver is endlessly restorative. Here’s an excerpt from “Morning Poem”:

If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it

the thorn that is heavier than lead – if it’s all you can do to keep on trudging –

there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted –

Happy Life

by David Budbill Budbill feels like he might be my neighbor, writing about self-reliance, the seasons, aging, sex. His words are as immediate as it gets even though they’re inspired by ancient Chinese poets. Here’s an excerpt from “Then and Now”:

Imagine: never able to travel faster than the river current. Day after day, all that Time to read, play a flute, watch the mist

rising between mountains as you float by.

On Love and Barley

by Basho Strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism, the Japanese poet Basho is known for his haiku, which was infused with karumi, or lightness. The introduction of this collection describes this quality as “the artistic expression of non-attachment, the result of calm realization of profoundly felt truths.” Don’t know about you, but my mom-self is ready for a healthy dose of karumi come late July. Three lines and 17 syllables long, you can practically read one between sneezes. Here are some of my favorites:

Under the cherry – blossom soup, blossom salad.

Noon doze, wall cool against my feet.

Come out, bat – birds, earth itself hauled off by flowers.

Parting, straw-clutching for support.

View with a Grain of Sand

by Wislawa Szymborska When I read Szymbnorska, I feel like I’m talking to my grandmother. Shrewd, adroit, and a little mischievous, her youth bleeds through her wisdom. This excerpt from “A Moment in Troy” makes me wish I had a daughter and, a moment later, feel very relieved not to.

Little girls – skinny, resigned to freckles that won’t go away,

not turning any heads as they walk across the eyelids of the world,

looking just like Mom or Dad, and sincerely horrified by it –

in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a book, while studying the mirror, may suddenly be taken off to Troy.

Transformations

by Anne Sexton You remember Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Sexton retells them here with poetry, enhancing their weird, dark mystery. You might not want to read these versions to the kids, though: In the foreword, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. says that Sexton “domesticates my terror, examines it and describes it, teaches it some tricks which will amuse me, then lets it gallop wild in my forest once more.” That’s all it took for me to buy the book. Here’s an excerpt from her rendition of “The Frog Prince”:

Like a genie coming out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of her royal bedroom. He had kind eyes and hands and was a friend of sorrow. Thus they were married. After all he had compromised her.

He hired a night watchman so that no one could enter the chamber and he had the well boarded over so that never again would she lose her ball, that moon, that Krishna hair, that blind poppy, that innocent globe, that madonna womb.

If you’re feeling stuck in a summer slump, get lost in a little poetry. It’s contemplative, intimate, eye-opening, therapeutic, and a powerful antidote to the hustle of schlepping your sunburned, bug-bitten munchkins all over creation. And please, share some of your favorite poets below!

---

---

Also in Conversations