inspiration and hard work, and its effect is to illuminate our lives and breathe new life, new seeing, new tasting into the world we thought we knew. Poetry bids us to eat the apple whole.
Poems like the ones in this book shake me awake. They pass on their attentiveness, their insight, their love of this broken world to me, the reader. We can wake up to the world and to ourselves in a new way by reading poems such as these — especially when we read them aloud, and shape the sounds on our lips and the rhythms on our breath — making us more fully human. The poet Jane Hirshfield says, “Whether from reading the New England Transcendentalists or Eskimo poetry, I feel that everything I know about being human has been deepened by the poems I’ve read.”2
John Keats speaks of this humanizing power, too, when he says, “Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a Remembrance.”3
That’s all very well, you might say. Poems may be a humanizing influence, they may even carry us to the heights of spiritual insight and realization, but what have they done to shift the world’s obsession with power, greed, and violence? What has a poem done to dissolve injustice? This argument has been rising and falling for centuries, but it is worth our notice that poetry and literature in general have been routinely banned around the world at various times because of their subversive influence. If poetry and literature are humanizing influences, they work directly against those regimes and ideologies that restrict rather than encourage liberty and justice. Nazim Hikmet, whose poem “It’s This Way” is in this book, spent eighteen years in a Turkish prison for his beliefs. Because poetry connects different worlds, different ideas, and different people and things, it generates empathy — empathy with others and with all living things. When, through a poetic act of imagination, one feels kinship with others and with all life, it is that much more difficult to oppress others; and that, in a tyrannical regime, is subversion.
Stalin tried to strip Russia of its soul with his death camps. Poet Osip Mandelstam restored that soul by reciting poetry to his fellow convicts and by writing about it in his journal. “Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances,” Saul Bellow writes, “is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place — the foreground.”4
That, after all, is what politics is ultimately about — human feelings and the human form. Poetry can give a human face to our collective struggles and remind us that this human world is not only broken, it is beautiful. That is what the poems in this volume do. There’s a headstone in a Long Island graveyard — the one where Jackson Pollock is buried — that I think encapsulates the value and necessity of poetry in a world of sorrows: “Artists and poets are the raw nerve ends of humanity. By themselves they can do little to save humanity. Without them there would be little worth saving.”
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
It is surely a writer’s dream: to publish a work that by sheer coincidence or synchronicity strikes the mother lode of public attention by giving voice to an emerging mood in the zeitgeist. Perhaps an unexpected event, either tragic or celebratory, galvanizes a nation. Perhaps the moon shines green for a night, everyone out in the streets looking up at the sky, mouths open wide, and it just so happens that a line straight out of your new poem speaks to such a moon.
A writer, no more than anyone else, never knows which way the wind will blow, never knows if her work is destined to disappear forever into the netherworld of the great unread, or whether it happens by some curious concatenation of events to have found, unwittingly, the precise words and mood to foreshadow a collective joy or tragedy, and thereby be destined to leap from pages everywhere, to general public acclaim. At the time of writing, however, these concerns barely exist, if at all. All that matters then is the music of the next line.
In summer 2015, Maggie Smith, a freelance writer and editor with an MFA from Ohio State, was sitting in a Starbucks in her hometown of Bexley, Ohio, not far from Columbus. She wrote the first line of a new poem — “Life is short, though I keep this from my children.” The rest of the poem flowed easily from there, so that by the time she left the coffee shop she had a new piece of work that had come out whole.
A year later, in June 2016, as a gunman killed forty-nine people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and British politician Jo Cox was murdered in broad daylight at a constituency meeting in the north of England, Smith’s poem “Good Bones” was published in the online journal Waxwing.
A reader touched by the poem’s message posted a screenshot on Facebook, where a Brooklyn-based musician read it and passed it along on Twitter. Articles about the poem quickly appeared in The Guardian, Slate, and elsewhere, helping to spread the poem worldwide.
Since then the poem has been interpreted by a dance troupe in India, turned into a musical score for the voice and harp, and translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Korean, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Smith, whose poetry was known only by poetry aficionados before the publication of “Good Bones,” suddenly found herself an international celebrity. In the months after the poem’s publication she was invited to speak at book festivals and conferences around the country and in Europe. Public Radio International called “Good Bones” “the official poem of 2016.” Then along came the shock of the 2016 election, and her poem took off into the blogosphere again, rippling out onto the radio and into media everywhere.
In November 2016 it became one of the three most downloaded poems on the site of the American Academy of Poets. “Good Bones” has become something of a societal anxiety barometer. “I can tell something bad is happening in the world when my poem is surging,” Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two, told Nora Krug of The Washington Post.
On the day after the 2016 election, Vox published a post headlined “Feeling terrible right now? Maybe some poetry will help.” The Guardian had one listing “poems to counter the election fallout — and beyond.” The Huffington Post, for its part, offered “18 Compassionate Poems to Help You