Where Do Poems Hide?

One of my favorite poems is "Valentine for Ernest Mann" by Naomi Shihab Nye. It's a great poem about where poets find their poems. In it, Nye points out that poems are hiding everywhere and we just need to learn to see them. You don't have to be a poet to appreciate her point, though. Beauty, inspiration, ideas of all kinds are hiding in plain sight all around us. Marcel Proust said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Creative writing teachers love to go on and on about this kind of thing, and I guess I probably will, too, as I continue with this blog. In the mean time, here's Nye's poem:

Valentine for Ernest Mann

Naomi Shihab Nye

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.

Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”

and expect it to be handed back to you

on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,

write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.

So I’ll tell a secret instead:

poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,

they are sleeping. They are the shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment

before we wake up. What we have to do

is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife

two skunks for a valentine.

He couldn’t understand why she was crying.

“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”

And he was serious. He was a serious man

who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly

just because the world said so. He really

liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them

as valentines and they became beautiful.

At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding

in the eyes of skunks for centuries

crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us

we find poems. Check your garage, the off sock

in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.

And let me know.

Inspired by Nye's poem, I've written several poems about where poems hide. Below is a recent one from my journal complete with spelling errors and some pretty bad lines, but I think there's a few good ones too. I had doodled the tree several days before and then just thought it would be fun to write the poem around it. It makes it a heck of a trick to read the poem, but I had fun.

Here's a video of Nye reading her poem and explaining how she came up with the idea: