National Poetry Month, expanded edition, pt 1

Pooh, poet

Hello, Poetry Friend

April was National Poetry Month — not May. But I was writing about Lent and Van Gogh last month. Let’s enjoy an expanded edition of National Poetry Month, shall we?

(an earlier version of this post appeared at Tweetspeak Poetry on May 15, 2020)

My absolute favorite explanation of how poetry works comes from Winnie-the-Pooh. The passage occurs in the story “In Which Eeyore Finds the Wolery and Owl Moves Into It” from The House at Pooh Corner.

Piglet has just saved the day — or, in A.A. Milne’s words, “done a very grand thing.” To commemorate the brave deed, Pooh has composed a Hum (a poem) with seven verses.

Seven? said Piglet as carelessly as he could. “You don’t often get seven verses in a Hum, do you, Pooh?”

“Never,” said Pooh. “I don’t suppose it’s ever been heard of before.”

Pooh sings all seven verses to Piglet, who “just stood and glowed.” When it ends, Piglet has a question of Pooh, poet:

“Did I really do all that?” he said at last.

Well,” said Pooh, “in poetry—in a piece of poetry—well, you did it, Piglet, because the poetry says you did. And that’s how people know.”

This, Poetry Friend, is how poems work. Poems are true because the poetry says they are true.

Poetry isn’t memoir, which needs to be carefully weighed against that house of cards called memory. It’s not nonfiction or journalism, which needs to be fact-checked. But it’s not quite fiction either. It lives in its own space. It even has its own section in the library or at the bookshop.

So play. Have fun. If you feel moved to compose seven verses in your hum, go for it. If not, a haiku will do.

Recently I was working on a poem that had been kicking around for years — about a rainbow I saw in a football stadium while I was supposed to be watching the game. But I could not stop watching the rainbow.

I changed the stadium where the rainbow occurred: not the shiny new McLane Stadium, but the beast that was Floyd Casey, now demolished. I published a version of the poem on my blog in 2016, but looking back, it wasn’t quite right. Then I saw a prompt to write sports-inspired poems, and I thought I’d rework it.

As I wrote I thought of Piglet. Because while I was watching the rainbow, I was thinking of someone who dearly loved that little guy. Why not put the person there in the stadium with me? If the poetry says he was there, then he was.

And if I don’t write it, how else will people know?

Floyd Casey Stadium

This is not what forgiveness is supposed to look like:
—fast-food tacos and football.

The game should be reason enough to talk
but as players flatten each other, we watch,

our flat faces do not form words.
The forecast warned of lightning

but all is dry. I stare, sit through
some other touchdown. 

The ethos of the game eludes us.
It seems gratuitous to mention the rainbow—

really too on the nose.
But there it is, shining 

through our recalcitrance.
You point: My first rainbow.

No, I say. Remember the one in Colorado?
At the mountain house? you ask.

— Megan Willome

Happy poeming!

Megan