"The world is lost in its noise...."
A little poetry to help you through the madness.
Greetings and salutations! Right about now you’d normally find a brand spankin’ new interview in your (e)mailbox, but I’m currently on vacation. The past seven weeks have been the longest year of my life and Mama needs a break.
But I didn’t want a week to go by without sending something and I thought if you, too, are completely, utterly gutted by all that’s going on in the world, perhaps a little poetry might help. Not poetry written by me—the best I could pull off is a cliché-riddled haiku about my cat—but poems by those who have the ability to, as Buddy Wakefield says, go “behind the doorway” and use language to help the rest of us make sense of the madness.
I found myself listening to more poems after my recent interviews with Buddy, poet Kindall Gant, and thriller author Gillian McAllister, who uses The Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day as inspiration for her writing. (You’ll get that interview next week.) So I put together a playlist of some of my favorites, including pieces by Gil Scott-Heron, Sekou Sundiata, Suheir Hummad, Ani DiFranco, Shihan, and even Men at Work’s Colin Hay. I’m sharing it with you now.
The title of today’s newsletter comes from the first piece in the playlist, J. Ivy’s “The World Needs More Poets.”
When the world is lost in its noise
The words of the poet are the calm in the storm
I hope the poems in this collection provide a little calm (or clarity or inspiration or beauty or laughter) for you, as they’ve done for me.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I hope to be back to more frequent posts after I return from vacation. Next week’s interview will arrive in your mailbox on Friday. Until then, stay healthy, safe, and sane.
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