Reciting the New Year In

Poetry was not a big part of my informal upbringing nor my formal education. Though I did get a poem published in The Harrison Echoes, my elementary school “literary magazine,” when I was in first grade. I believe it was:

I was up in the sky

And I waved goodbye.

 A good sign that poetry was not to be my career path! 

 

In high school, I believe Walt Whitman was my first poet of note that I read, perhaps sprinkled by a few grains of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” and of course, Robert Frost and his two roads and snowy evening. But it was e.e.cummings, sometime around late high school or college, who lit the flame that has burned at different intensities my whole life long. His imaginative structure and syntax, his singing the praises of Spring and Love and the mystery of mere existence, spoke to my emerging romantic self. I still have the big hardcover book of his collected poems gifted to me by my first girlfriend, with select poems marked. 

 

Fast forward a few decades to when I began a project of memorizing poems. At the height of my powers, I had some 45 poems on the tip of my tongue—a few each from poets like Yeats, Shakespeare, Mary Oliver, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, Robert Frost and more. But oddly, not anything by e.e.cummings. Was he just a passing fancy?

 

Today, I hope to honor a new New Year’s Day ritual of re-memorizing many of the poems that have been hibernating for much of the year, something I’ve done for the last ten years or so. I awoke with the line “when serpents bargain for the right to squirm” on my mind, so a clear message that it is time to include my first favorite poet in the mix. I’ll begin memorizing that poem and then hope to include “o sweet Spontaneous earth” and “In Just-Spring” in my repertoire. To my mind, he holds up. A good reminder to us all on this first day of the year to reclaim what is truly normal and refuse the rest. Happy New Year!

 

                       when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
                    and the sun strikes to gain a living wage -
                    when thorns regard their roses with alarm
                    and rainbows are insured against old age

                    when every thrush may sing no new moon in
                    if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
                    - and any wave signs on the dotted line
                    or else an ocean is compelled to close

                    when the oak begs permission of the birch
                    to make an acorn - valleys accuse their
                    mountains of having altitude - and march
                    denounces april as a saboteur

                    then we’ll believe in that incredible
                    unanimal mankind (and not until)