Poetry helps keep us caring: Naomi

In a world torn with violence and wars, you speak of tenderness and kindness. I would like to know about the relationship between you as a person/poet and this contradiction of our everyday.

Our ways of behavior and attitude are surely affected by the world’s difficult and continuously disappointing happenings, but there is no contradiction in preferring to embody peace, strive toward daily harmony, attempt to be a balanced, sympathetic human. Poetry helps us feel better, more tender toward our own lives and one another’s. Poetry notices the precious details and tries to sing of them. I was raised in the Vedanta tradition of the Vedanta Society of St. Louis – Sri Ramakrishna was one of the first holy people I learned about, as a child. The peace prayer – Shanthi, Shanthi, Shanthi – which closed every service, remains forever echoing in my mind.

 Can you tell us about your writing routine? How does a poem happen to you?

Writers are helped by developing a very simple regular practice. I sit every day – usually earliest morning – to write and accept what comes to me, however minor, however small. Sometimes that inconsequential opening leads us somewhere. I never wait for a big idea. I don’t even believe much in big ideas. Possibly they happen for other people, but I trade in the small. Once I was in India working with middle school students on Valentine’s Day. By the end of the day, love poems had been written to everything – hair, toilets, the light coming through the windows of our big room, time, memory, grandmothers, rice. It was a great day.

One thing I particularly love about your poems is they have a certain fable-like quality to them. Poems like The Rider, The Traveling Onion, Streets etc. Can you tell us more about this beautiful tone with which your poems choose to speak.

Thank you. I heard my father’s voice so deeply as a child – I still hear it, 14 years after he died. He sat by our beds telling us gentle little folktales and fables from his home country of Palestine. That voice awakened something in me which has never gone to sleep. I love narrative, the simple stories every day is packed with – if we allow ourselves to feel and find them. My father wrote a book called Does the Land Remember Me? A Memoir of Palestine, which was published only 3 months before he died. An earlier book was called A Taste of Palestine. You can hear his voice in these books.

 What, according to you, would be the role of poetry in a world that’s so replete with violence?

Poetry helps keep us caring. Poetry helps keep us sane. Poetry helps us imagine the preciousness of every life – plant and animal, as well as human. We are not stuck inside ourselves.

 Please give any advice to our young poets.

Read a lot. Read many styles of writing – poetry, fiction, nonfiction, try to read authors from many countries. Double your current reading time. The great American poet Marvin Bell said, Read something, then write something. And let what you write reflect what you have read. The endless nourishment, one to another.

Find a regular practice of writing – even 3 lines a day can be significant.

Find a way to share your work. The internet has extended our boundaries immeasureably. Look at us, right here! We are speaking across the miles.

About Naomi Shihabe Nye

“Before you know what kindness really is/ you must lose things”, writes Naomi Shihab Nye, an internationally acclaimed Palestinian-American poet, novelist and song-writer. Her life and her writings are deeply intertwined with the war torn history of the past few decades of the World we live in. A distinctive kindness and grace radiate from her poems that seem  urgently necessary in our times. Her recent book ‘The Tiny Journalist’ is inspired by the story of Janna Jihad Ayyad, the “Youngest Journalist in Palestine,” who at age 7 began capturing videos of anti-occupation protests using her mother’s smartphone. She has taught writing and worked in schools across the world. At present, she is a professor of creative writing at Texas State University.  She is the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate, serving from 2019 to 2021.

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