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How to Love the World
Poems of Gratitude and Hope
Contributors
By James Crews
Foreword by Ross Gay
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What the world needs now – featuring poems from inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and more.
More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.
Excerpt
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Edited by Liz Bevilacqua
Art direction and book design by Alethea Morrison
Illustrations by © Dinara Mirtalipova
Text © 2021 by James Crews except as shown on 187–195
Ebook production by Slavica A. Walzl
Ebook version 1.0
March 23, 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
Joy is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.
Brother David Steindl-Rast
Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.
Jericho Brown
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword,
The Necessity of Joy,
Hope
Dandelion
Promise
At the Age of 18—Ode to Girls of Color
In Any Event
Astral Chorus
My Daughter's Singing
Surprise Breakfast
The Facts of Life
Fifteen Years Later, I See How It Went
The Newborns
Shells
Bus Stop
Hoodie
Angel
Thankful for Now
Reflective Pause: The Joy of Presence
Autism Poem: The Grid
Kindergarten Studies the Human Heart
Valentine's Day
In Gratitude
Held Open
Listening for Your Name
Another Day Filled with Sleeves of Light,
A Cure Against Poisonous Thought
Forgiveness
Two Weeks After a Silent Retreat
Reflective Pause: The Kingdom at Hand
Today, When I Could Do Nothing
Red Thyme
The Once Invisible Garden
Down to Earth
Old Friends
Let It Rain
Against Panic
Over the Weather
Notions
Any Common Desolation
Reflective Pause: Returning to the World
Language, Prayer, and Grace
The Fish
Reincarnate
Innocence
Everything Is Made of Labor
Apple Blossoms
Growing Apples
Aspen
With Trees
Shelter in Place
Missing Key
Climbing the Golden Mountain
To See It
Unclouded Vision
Improvement
Reflective Pause: Grateful for Small Victories
After Spending the Morning Baking Bread
Radiance
Morning
Wedding Poem
Pledge
Amores Perros
Mending
In the Dark
A Candle in the Night
Praise of Darkness
An Essay on Age
Easter Morning
The Cardinal Reminds Me
When Life Seems a To-Do List
Moon
Because the Night You Asked
September Swim
What to Do
Any Morning
Reflective Pause: Pieces of Heaven
How It Might Continue
From Blossoms
Motherhood
Wondrous
Summer Apples
Third Year of My Mother's Dementia
Rabbit
Laughter
In the Company of Women
Leaning to the Light
I Watched an Angel in the Emergency Room
When Giving Is All We Have
Offering
Too Many to Count
If I Carry My Father
Weather
Work
Reflective Pause: The Joy of Making
Goldfinches
The Lesser Goldfinch
The Word
Tomorrow
Quail Hollow
Compost Happens
Part of the Landscape
Essential Gratitude
Reflective Pause: The Gratitude List
Gratitude List
The Dog Body of My Soul
Scratch, Sniff
Summer Cottage
Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
Perceptive Prayer
Sap Icicles
the lesson of the falling leaves
A Dervish of Leaves
Winter Morning
The Good Life
Thanksgiving for Two
Reflective Pause: The Feast of Each Moment
Nest
Getting into Bed on a December Night
Everybody Made Soups
Darkest Before Dawn
Rosary
To Ask
There Doesn't Need to Be a Poem
Wingspan
Eagle Poem
What Matters
In Love with the World
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Poet Biographies
Credits
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Acknowledgments
Deep gratitude to the many people who helped to make this book a reality: the team at Storey Publishing, for agreeing to take a chance on a book of poetry, especially Deborah Balmuth, Liz Bevilacqua, Alee Moncy, Jennifer Travis, and Melinda Slaving, as well as Lauren Moseley at Algonquin Books for publicity support; Katie Rubinstein for making the connection and her beautiful work; everyone at A Network for Grateful Living, especially Kristi Nelson and Saoirse McClory, for their support of poetry; Brother David Steindl-Rast for his teachings on gratefulness, which we need now more than ever; Ted Kooser, for his enduring friendship, inspiration, and example of kindness; the late, great David Clewell, whose exuberant spirit not only made me fall in love with poetry, but also led me to future mentors Ron Wallace and Jesse Lee Kercheval; all of the poets included here for their generosity in sharing their work; Ross Gay for writing a foreword that is both a blessing and a poem in and of itself; Naomi Shihab Nye, Maria Popova, and Elizabeth Berg for their support of writing that makes us all feel more human; Garland Richmond, Diana Whitney, Heather Newman, Heather Swan, and Michelle Wiegers for essential support; my students at SUNY-Albany and Eastern Oregon University for giving me hope and serving as first readers; my husband, Brad Peacock, and our Crews and Peacock families, for reminding me every day why I'm so grateful to be alive.
Foreword
I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about witness, about how witness itself is a kind of poetics, or poesis, which means making. By which I mean I have been wondering about how we make the world in our witnessing of it. Or maybe I have come to understand, to believe, how we witness makes our world. This is why attending to what we love, what we are astonished by, what flummoxes us with beauty, is such crucial work. Such rigorous work. Likewise, studying how we care, and are cared for, how we tend and are tended to, how we give and are given, is such necessary work. It makes the world. Witnessing how we are loved and how we love makes the world. Witness and study, I should say. Witness as study, I think I mean.
Truth is, we are mostly too acquainted with the opposite, with the wreckage. It commands our attention, and for good reason. We have to survive it. But even if we need to understand the wreckage to survive it, it needn't be the primary object of our study. The survival need be. The reaching and the holding need be. The here, have this need be. The come in, you can stay here need be. The let's share it all need be. The love need be. The care need be. That which we are made by, held by, need be. Who's taken us in need be. Who's saved the seed need be. Who's planted the milkweed need be. Who's saved the water need be. Who's saved the forest need be. The forest need be. The water. The breathable air. That which witnessed us forth need be. How we have been loved need be. How we are loved need be.
How we need need be, too. Our radiant need. Our luminous and mycelial need. Our need immense and immeasurable. Our need absolute need be. And that study, that practice, that witness, is called gratitude. Our gratitude need be.
This is what I want to study. This is with whom.
Ross Gay
The Necessity of Joy
One day a few weeks ago, I woke up in a terrible mood. I've always been a morning person, relishing those early hours when the world is still asleep, before emails, texts, and the rest of my distractions take over. I love the ritual of making pour-over coffee for my husband and myself, inhaling the fragrant steam that curls up from the grounds as I pour on the boiling water. Yet this day, I couldn't shake my annoyance as I smashed a pat of cold, hard butter onto my toast, tearing a hole in the bread. I shook my head and scowled, then looked over at my husband who smiled. "What?" I said. He just stared deeply into my eyes and asked, "Are you happy to be alive today?" I glared at him at first, but I also let his question stop my mind. And in that gap, a rush of gratitude swept in. Yes, I was happy to be alive, happy to be standing in the kitchen next to the man I love, about to begin another day together. Happy to have coffee, food, and a warm place to live. Happy even to feel that dark mood swirling through me because it was also evidence of my aliveness.
Are you happy to be alive? The poems gathered in this book each ask, in their own ways, that same question, which has more relevance now than ever. As Brother David Steindl-Rast, the founder of A Network for Grateful Living, has famously pointed out: "In daily life, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy." Paying attention to our lives is the first step toward gratitude and hope, and the poems in How to Love the World model for us the kind of mindfulness that is the gateway to a fuller, more sustainable happiness that can be called joy. Whether blessing a lawn full of common dandelions, or reminding us, as Tony Hoagland does, to "sit out in the sun and listen," these poets know that hope, no matter how slight it might seem, is as pressing a human need right now as food, water, shelter, or rest. We may survive without it, but we cannot thrive.
During these uncertain and trying times, we tell ourselves that joy is an indulgence we can no longer afford. And we've become all too familiar with the despair filling the airwaves and crowding our social media feeds, leading to what psychologists now call empathy or compassion fatigue, whereby we grow numb and disconnected from the suffering of others. We want to stay informed about what's going on in the world, yet we also know that absorbing so much negativity leaves us drained and hopeless. We know it's robbing us of the ability to be present to our own experience and grateful for something as simple as the moon, which is here, as Lahab Assef Al-Jundi points out, "to illuminate our illusion" of separateness from one another.
For many years, reading and writing poetry has been my personal source of delight, an antidote to the depression that can spring up out of nowhere. I now carve out what I call "soul time" for myself each day, making space for silence and reflection, even if it is just five or ten minutes, even if I have to wake up a little earlier to do it. The time I take to pause and read a favorite poem from a book, or jot down some small kindness from the day before, can utterly transform my mindset for the rest of the day. I invite you to use each poem in How to Love the World in a similar way, to make reading (and writing, if you wish) part of your own daily gratitude practice. Throughout the collection, I've also included reflective pauses, with specific suggestions for writing practices based upon the poems. When you encounter one of these, you may simply read that poem and reflection, then move on. Or you might keep a notebook nearby and stop to write, letting the guiding questions lead you more deeply into your own encounters with gratitude, hope, and joy. I encourage you to use any of these poems that spark something as jumping-off points for a journal entry, story, or poem of your own.
I trust in the necessity and pleasure of all kinds of creativity—from cooking a meal to fixing a car to sketching in the margins of a grocery list—but poetry is an art form especially suited to our challenging times. It helps us dive beneath the surface of our lives, and enter a place of wider, wilder, more universal knowing. And because poetry is made of the everyday material of language, we each have access to its ability to hold truths that normal conversation simply can't contain. When you find
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"How to Love the World is for every one of us who welcomes or misses the fullness of joy and the wholeness of days." — Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation
"You’ll find lots of poets to love within these pages… this book is exactly what we need in these times – or in any." — Elizabeth Berg, author of I'll Be Seeing You and The Story of Arthur Truluv
"The anthology represents a wide range of poetic voices revealing gratitude as an essential emotion that is simple and complex, all around us but also elusive." — The Boston Globe
"This uplifting collection of poems from masterful poets (Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more) will not only move you but also remind you that joy can be found during times that feel dark. There are some that are tinted in longing (like “Bus Stop” by Laure-Anne Bosselaar) and some that serve as a beautiful reminder of appreciation (“Thankful For Now” by Todd Davis). The visceral, weighty words from these poets invoke meaning in things that may seem meaningless, pushing us to slow down and reflect." — BuzzFeed
"Readers looking for poetic antidotes to today’s chronic anxiety and frenetic news cycle might enjoy turning to this new and highly readable collection. Spend some time with joy and gratitude through deeply felt work from some of poetry’s most trusted voices including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, Ellen Bass, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirschfield, and others often featured in the pages of Orion. Interspersed with invitations to write and reflect, this book is designed for discussion and is classroom-ready." — Orion Magazine
- On Sale
- Mar 23, 2021
- Page Count
- 208 pages
- Publisher
- Storey
- ISBN-13
- 9781635863864
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