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Poetry from Daily Life: You can meet 100 people and only like a few. Poets are the same.
My guest this week on “Poetry from Daily Life” — marking a full year of weekly columns — is Lola Haskins, who lives in Gainesville, Florida. She discovered her love for poetry when she was read AA Milne at the age of four, and she’s never looked back since. Her latest collection, “Homelight” (Charlotte Lit Press, 2023), was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review and has been shortlisted for the Hoffer Prize. Lola walks in the woods every day and owes a lot to trees. She has collaborated with dancers, visual artists and musicians, and sings mariachi and Hindu classical music. ~ David L. Harrison
I feel so strongly that poetry is for everyone, that I could stand on a street corner and preach it. And by poetry, I mean both the poetry you read and the poetry that lives in all of us if only we’re willing to listen. Take the first. If you think you’re not a “poetry person” that’s only because you haven’t met the right poet. Look at it like this: If you were in a room with any hundred people — doesn’t matter what KIND of people — how many of them would turn out to be your soulmates? One? two? I had a friend in England who would pantomime a yawn every time I mentioned poetry, so I went to the library and checked out books by three poets I thought he’d like. And when he’d read a bit of each, he said, OK, OK, so not all poets are boring.
But poems can reach way beyond reading. Some of them can literally change lives. When I was teaching programming at University of Florida, I’d put a poem on my door (never mine) and make my students read it before they came in. Once, it was Robert Haydon’s “Those Winter Sundays,” one of the most eye-opening poems about love that’s ever been written. One day a kid came in with his program under his arm, and when I reached for it, he said he didn’t need to talk about it after all, because he’d read the poem on my door. And without saying another word, he left my office and drove 2 ½ hours to his father’s grave in Tampa to tell him he was sorry, that he understands now. Later, two other students — years apart — told me that they’d decided not to kill themselves because of something I wrote. I wrote it for the first one and put it in one of my books and the second student found it there. I don’t care if it’s a good poem or not, but the fact that it exists is proof positive that poetry can not just change, but save lives.
Now, to my second point. It’s true that writing poetry can be a career (it is for me, but it’s not just that, it’s so much who I am that I couldn’t retire from it any more than I could retire from breathing), but it absolutely doesn’t have to be. And the fact you write poems at all (or do anything else categorized as “artistic”) leaves you richer inside than if you didn’t AND — this is important — don’t let anyone tell you it’s a hobby unless you see it that way yourself.
I’ll finish with a poem from “Desire Lines” about something we all do.
Sleep Positions
This is how we sleep:
On our backs, with pillows covering our chests, heavy as dirt
On our sides, like wistful spoons
Clenched, knees in-tucked, arms folded
Wide, like sprawling-rooted lotuses
In Iowa on top of pictures of Hawaii, huge white flowers on blue In New York on black satin In China on straw.
⚬
This is how our dreams arrive:
As hot yellow taxicabs
As sudden blazing steam, we who have been pots on a stove, looking only at our own lids
As uninvited insects, all at once on our tongues.
⚬
O hairdresser, auditor, hard-knuckled puller of crab traps, you who
think poetry was school, you who believe you never had a flying
thought, lie down.
Lola Haskins has published 14 books. Learn more about her at http://www.lolahaskins.com.
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