“Valentine for Ernest Mann” can be found here.

This poem is a more recent addition to my notebook, originally encountering it from a poetry account on the internet. It’s not the first Naomi Shihab Nye poem I’ve read by a long shot (her work is featured often in the anthology Poetry 180, which I own and am currently reading and my 12th grade Lit teacher was very fond of) but it’s the first Nye poem to make it into my notebook.

I believe I chose this poem because it brings magic to the mundane. In the word you enter reading “Valentine for Ernest Mann” poems exist like lost dogs, curling up at the feet of those who find them. They exist in mismatched socks, shadowy storage rooms, and inside the eyes of skunks. Nye gives us a glimpse into a whole world of poetry.

I want to live in that world. The one where poems are everywhere, coating along the back of every surface, hiding in the dirt beneath each rock I overturn. Joseph Brodsky, the 1991 Poet Laureate, imagined a world where poetry could be given out in the checkout line of supermarkets, or found tucked in alongside bibles in hotel rooms. The idea of that makes my heart very happy. I want to take that world and skip it along a pond like a nice flat stone, until it sinks down to a place beneath the water where poems exist in every crevasse, written literally along the walls of the buildings we create.

Maybe some of this is the creative in me. The desire to make the world beautiful. To wrap a strand of colored yarn around every object I walk by until we’re all tied together. I crochet by the way. In case you didn’t know.

I love being overwhelmed by inspiration. The feeling when I come up with an idea so strong I can spend hours upon hours laying in the dark, unable to fall asleep. They rarely manifest into reality though. I get scared, or busy with something else, or distracted. In my life, my own art is a distant fourth priority, snuck among the gaps of other things. Hidden like the poems in Nye’s world.

I did it once, though. One time I did it. Made the world more beautiful with lines of yarn. For months, I worked with a group at my high school to make a sweater. We crocheted square after square, sewing them all together week after week (it was a very big sweater). At the end, we attached it around the statue of our mascot outside the school. I don’t know how many people even noticed it was there, but since then, I’ve been stuck on the idea of brightening my life with yarn. I want to draw attention to the beauty that’s already there. I want to draw color out of the spaces where it hides.

I suppose to many, talking about crochet seems unrelated to the poem listed above. I suppose it’s true that this post is less analytical and more emotional than my other Passion Blog pieces. I suppose it’s because this poem makes me emotional. For me, one of the main purposes of poetry is to enhance the world; it calls attention to things that are beautiful (or could be beautiful) and makes it into something even moreso. Poetry changes the angle into which you view the world. This poem changes the angle of how I view the world. It reminds me of the possibility, gives me free permission to image what I’d like to see, a world that really does have poems under every rock, laying across each surface. That world has color and light and yarn leaking out of each and every pore. “Valentine for Ernest Mann” reminds me of that dream, when I start to forget because of work or school or any of the other obligations my art has to try and live in the cracks of. This poem makes me want to let it out. I take a step towards living in “a way that lets us find them.”.