'Grace Notes'

Naomi Shihab Nye: in person!!

Hello, Poetry Friend

Saturday was a good day. It was the inaugural Fredericksburg Book Festival, and I finally got to hear poet Naomi Shihab Nye in person. Recently she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement. And she was absolutely as fabulous a human being as I imagined her to be.

Here are some quotes from her talk—some freestyle, some from her poems.

• “Don’t be too picky”—when it comes to writing a poem. Start with whatever is around you. She shared a poem she had written the day before, about answering questions on a Medicare form.

• “Keeping notes is the key to being a writer”—because moments come and go so quickly. She said she kept an entire notebook on the sayings of a friend’s son because everything he said was poem-worthy.

• She asked us to think about “how often you’ve gone to words for solace”—especially in times of sadness or loss or need. Often poetry does those times best.

• She encouraged us to “leave poems on doorsteps”—a practice she has followed her whole life, because poems, being short, are also portable and easily read.

• She warned us that “poems hide,” and we need to live so we can find them.

• And if, even with all this golden advice, if you are still struggling to find your poems, she advised this: “Check your garage.”

Check your garage

Oh yes, there were poems.
And material for dissertations in a dozen fields.
Every yellow-spined National Geographic.
Tax records dating back to 1965.
Paint almost that old.
A dozen identital hammers.
Christmas plates still in the box, sealed.
Trash bags full of actual trash.
Suitcases full of clothes.
An ice chest full of fish.
There were probably rats, but I sang loudly to scare them away.
Somewhere under all that was a classic Mercedes, 
undriven, and perhaps, writable.

–Megan Willome

If you don’t know where to start with Nye, I recommend her most recent collection, Grace Notes, a memoir of poems about her mom, Miriam Naomi Allwardt Shihab. Since my first book, The Joy of Poetry, was built on poems about my mom, I dearly enjoyed reading about someone else’s mom, and how another poet remembers through poetry.

I also appreciated that Nye read from a recent collection she edited, titled I Know About a Thousand Things, by an unpublished writer in Uvalde named Ann Alejandro. Nye and another literary friend, Marion Winik, edited Alejandro’s thousands of pages into a book. The audience ooo’d and ahhh’d over her words, and I loved that Nye used some of her speaking time to pay tribute to a poet who came and went, known only to everyone who knew her.

That is the book I purchased, and when I have my book launch/birthday party next week at Texas Heritage Vineyard, I’m going to read a few words by Alejandro. My collection, Love and other Mysteries, began because of Uvalde, and anyone who might read my words deserves to hear words from one of Uvalde’s own.

For more Naomi Shihab Nye at Poetry for life:

• her untitled poem about Big Bend National Park in Texas Monthly, which I memorized in December.

• her poem “Kindness,” which I memorized back in 2019. She did read it at the event, and I mouthed along.

Happy poeming!

Megan