Category: Poetry

As a bookseller, I enjoy watching readers overturn myths about poetry, beginning with the misconception that poetry somehow belongs to a select few. It belongs to everyman, and everyman’s buying poetry that, through beauty, connects our inner worlds.

I feel a reservoir of joy well up when seeing momentary glimpses of beauty. It happens, too, when looking at someone I love. I also find huge pleasure in small, handmade treasures, a box covered in marbleized Italian paper or an exquisite letterpress card.

I find it beautiful when I can still turn my attention/inspiration elsewhere, be free to share and celebrate what is bliss in the world, or what is gentleness; what is itself so much according to the nature of its essence as to release us, remind us of, as, Anne Sexton wrote, the birds making sense of air.

We depend on poetry’s existence even if we don’t often encounter it, just as we should depend on the existence of natural wilderness even if we are never able to visit it in person. Its mere presence suffices to make us aware that life and the world are not all mundane, and can be viewed in a special lens when we need an extra push of the soul.

but pomegranate wine only ever carries bitterness, and the sky was purple that day with a sadness of its own; and she drank it in with open lips.