Day 5: Expansion
Up, up, and away.
It’s Day 5 of Poetry Camp and it’s time to say goodbye. You made it all the way to camp send-off. Have you been enjoying your trip?
Missed a day? Let’s rewind starting from day one: how to read a poem.
Is poetry what you expected it to be? Do you feel any different? Has the world around you shifted? That is reality. That is the real world, imagined and true. And you are there/here.
What does it look like here? What does it feel like?
Have you started listening more closely to lyrics, marvelled in multiple dimensions, exercised your senses?
Today, we are going to sum up our experience in Poetry Camp, touch down on the point of it all, the goal of reading words strung together in ways that don’t make instant, skimmable sense. Why this when our world demands speed, convenience, and the friction-free?
I recently had the pleasure of discovering and listening to poet
in an event put on by design studio Collins. As he puts it in his Substack, also named :Not all of us grow up from infancy practicing the art forms of painting, sculpture or music, but all of us grew intimately and from our very birth learning the power of words and the magic of language, when words first met and constellated together in such astonishing ways. Words were our horizon between self and other.
But I also love the idea, as you have now seen is possible, that poetry can intersect with all those things—art and sound and technology—to invite further possibility and accessibility.
Poetry is the practice and product of ultimate precision in language. No filler nor grand plan. Short and sweet—or savoury, or however you like your delights best served. Optimization for reading and listening pleasure, not for search engines or productivity. Intentionally designed tension between the mundane and the wondrous. The process of defamiliarizing and re-familiarizing.
There is no big meaning. No purpose. No right way.
Am I talking about poetry or life? I’m not sure. Maybe all of it.
Camp Assignment #5: Get Out There
I thought for a while about what assignment would be best suited for the last day of camp, and finally I settled on taking it easy.
After all, I want to leave a good impression, keep you coming back for more, make poetry feel more like an adventure and less like a test.
Instead, I’ll leave you on a final field assignment, a call to action, a quest for (more) adventure.
Time to skip to the good part and go find some poems of your own out in the wild.
Today’s Poetry Reading List
For your final reading list, I’ve curated a list of resources to continue your poetry discovery adventure—a starter kit, if you will.
After all, I’ve just shown you the beginning, a beginning very much based on my own personal tastes. And there is so much more out there. Truly, I am neither kidding nor exaggerating.
Have a commute? The Slowdown is a daily podcast featuring a new poem and reflection every weekday. Usually under ten minutes, this might just be a great way to take a breather in your day, get your daily shot of poetry in.
To invite welcome interruptions to your feed, try @poetryisnotaluxury, a popular Instagram account featuring wide range of easy-to-digest poetry. I also like @readalittlepoem, a smaller account by a poet and designer named T.
If you’re ready to go deep, Poetry Foundation offers a very wide range of programming for people interested in poetry, from a monthly magazine featuring nothing but poems, to a free poem of the day newsletter, to curated collections of poems, to poetry events. Many of the poems featured in Poetry Camp come from Poetry Foundation’s archive of over 45,000 poems. If you’re in Chicago or heading there, there’s the Poetry Foundation Library, holding over 30,000 volumes of poetry. (Poets.org is, similarly, another behemoth of a resource, also with a Poem-a-day email newsletter.)
Violets’ Picks, our Sunday feature, features one poetry collection a week, through the lens of discovery and texture and context. Yes, I really do read a poetry book every week, at least. It’s mostly because there’s no shortage out there and I’m just trying my best to catch up. (And always taking recommendations!)
For just a couple more of my favourite poetry Substacks, more fresh than stale in approach and very recently discovered because there isn't a Poetry category (you kind of just have to stumble upon them!):
("a poem a day by women writers"), ("born out of a love for un-precious poetry") and ("a scholar’s eye and a comedian’s sense of humor").Finally, when I say get out there, I mean it quite literally, too. I’ve never been to a poetry-only bookstore and there aren’t many of them, but here are a few on my list: Knife Fork Book (Toronto), Open Books: A Poem Emporium (Seattle), Wit and Cynical (Seoul), and The Poetry Pharmacy (Bishop’s Castle, England).
And a final call to adventure: Next time you head into a bookstore or your public library, wander into the poetry section. It’s usually hidden and very small and mostly filled with traditional poetry. But if you’re lucky, you just might find something that catches your attention. Take it home. Good poetry (“good” by your definition, not anyone else’s) has a much longer shelf life than that bestselling self-help book you can read once and never need again. Show support to an art form that desperately needs it, a poet that could use the reminder that what they’re doing mattered to someone.
May the process of discovering your first or next favourite poem be an adventure. Thanks for coming to Poetry Camp, and get out there.
I loved this series! Thank you for sharing your brilliant and expansive creativity, curiosity and sense of wonder Ana! 💓
The Slowdown is one of the best poetry podcasts ever. It’s perfect in length and tone.