poet | artist

We do it again, so that again we remember what came before. And again, another year along, we hope for what is to come. The long trip, the Thanksgiving meal prep, the conversations rehearsed. It’s an orchestrated remembering that we feast on.

Poetry isn’t known for being particularly warm and cheerful, so it’s no wonder if poets oftener try to be quiet at Thanksgiving dinner, even though we have a lot to say about gratitude. This poem by W.S. Merwin is one example of that — a kind of “thanks” that gives itself unblinkingly.

I’m thinking about faraway friends and their families, even as I’m in close company with mine. It is a harmony of “only connect” going on across the country. These efforts to be together and create lightness and joy can wonderfully sustain us in the dark.

I’m reading my friend James Hoch’s chapbook titled Radio Static, which is mostly about his relationship with his brother who served in Afghanistan with the US military. His phrase “the tense that thrives / on the other side of other” reverberates and echoes from the last line of a poem to the ends of human experience.

But on a day when we’re reflecting on American-ness, and how to drop the rancor and actually communicate, from the dinner table and on into ever-expanding circles of global-sized networks, I think poets ask us to do something that can work.

Tell me the tactics of being inside.

James Hoch, from Radio Static

Our own way of loving, with all the courage of soldiers, is all it would take.