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    Poems for Life: Celebrities on the Poems they Love
    Poems for Life: Celebrities on the Poems they Love
    Poems for Life: Celebrities on the Poems they Love
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    Poems for Life: Celebrities on the Poems they Love

    By Anna Quindlen

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    About this ebook

    What is your favorite poem? That is the question students from two fifth-grade classes at a New York grade school asked famous people to whom they had written. Their idea, the students explained, was to put together a book that would benefit the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. The students were also studying poems in class and wanted to know if anybody still, in fact, read and gained insight from poetry. Touched by this appeal to their hearts, minds, and memories, fifty celebrities responded to their inquiries, including Geraldine Ferraro, Allen Ginsberg, Rudi Giuliani, Peter Jennings, Angela Lansbury, Yo-Yo Ma, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Sawyer, Ally Sheedy, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tom Wolfe. The poems they offer range from John Donne to Langston Hughes, but their letters all express hope that the studentsand readers of this wonderful gift bookwill read and take inspiration from the poetry of past and present.

    Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling,” writes Anna Quindlen in her introduction, and this beautiful, inspiring collection of poetry is the perfect expression of how poets can influence and shape our lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcade
    Release dateDec 1, 2011
    ISBN9781628722765
    Poems for Life: Celebrities on the Poems they Love
    Author

    Anna Quindlen

    Anna Quindlen is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She is the author of nine novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Miller’s Valley, and Alternate Side. Her memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at The New York Times she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in Loud and Clear.

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    • 3/5
      Well, I didn't mean to, but I picked up this little volume last night and read the whole thing! It's obviously a quick read, and not as weighty or as peopled with really famous individuals as I had expected. Basically it was a project "compiled by the Grade V Classes of The Nightingale-Bamford School" to benefit the International Rescue Committee. The students wrote to various celebrities and "important" people asking that they contribute a favorite poem and explain its significance to them.As is always likely when approaching a large group of individuals, particularly when most of them are creative and/or driven, the result is somewhat erratic. Some people gave long, thoughtful responses; some jotted a quick note; some dictated an answer to a secretary. Some sent poems; some sent scraps of poems; some referred the students to poems; and some sent or referred to prose selections instead (why not?). The contributors range from "really" famous (Angela Lansbury, Yo-Yo Ma), to well-known in literary circles (E. L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates), to "huh?" (Whitney North Seymour Jr., Richard W. Riley). They are authors, politicians, teachers, priests, rabbis, actors, movie producers, photographers, and poets. The selections include some fairly predictable choices, such as "If," by Rudyard Kipling, and "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost, but there are some lesser known poems and at least one that was composed for this book.I think the one that spoke most strongly to me was Elie Wiesel's contribution, written by a Jewish boy named Motele in Yiddish (no last name, date, or poem title is provided):From tomorrow on, I shall be sad --From tomorrow on!Today I will be gay.What is the use of sadness -- tell me that? --Because these evil winds begin to blow?Why should I grieve for tomorrow -- today?Tomorrow may be so good, so sunny,Tomorrow the sun may shine for us again;We shall no longer need to be sad.From tomorrow on, I shall be sad --From tomorrow on!Not today, no! today I will be glad.And every day, no matter how bitter it be,I will say:From tomorrow on, I shall be sad,Not today!This is an enjoyable little collection. I will likely keep it for a while and reread it.

    Book preview

    Poems for Life - Anna Quindlen

    Introduction

    Poetry Emotion

    by Anna Quindlen

    Yusef Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize, but he does not expect to become a household name, and not because his name itself, phonetically simple once parsed out bit by bit, looks at first glance so unpronounceable. Mr. Komunyakaa won the prize for poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

    It’s hard to figure out why this should be true, why poetry has been shunted onto a siding at a time, a place, so in need of brevity and truth. We still use the word as a synonym for a kind of lovely perfection, for an inspired figure skater, an accomplished ballet dancer. Many of the finest books children read when young are poetry: The Cat in the Hat, Goodnight Moon, the free verse of Where the Wild Things Are.

    And then suddenly, just as their faces lose the soft curves of babyhood, the children harden into prose and leave verse behind, or reject it entirely. Their summer reading lists rarely include poetry, only stories, The Red Badge of Courage, not Mr. Komunyakaa’s spare and evocative poems about his hitch in Vietnam:

    He danced with tall grass

    for a moment, like he was swaying

    with a woman. Our gun barrels

    glowed white-hot.

    When I got to him,

    a blue halo

    of flies had already claimed him.

    For some of those children who once were lulled to sleep by the rhythms of Seuss and Sendak, poetry comes now set to music: Nirvana and Arrested Development, Tori Amos and the Indigo Girls. Many readers are scared off young, put off by the belief that poetry is difficult and demanding. We complain that it doesn’t sound like the way we talk, but if it sounds like the way we talk, we complain that it doesn’t rhyme.

    A poet who teaches in the schools tells of how one boy told him he couldn’t, wouldn’t write poetry. Then one day in class he heard Hayden Carruth’s Cows at Night and cried, "I didn’t know we were allowed to write poems about cows."

    Or write a poem about two women talking in the kitchen.

    Crazy as a bessy bug.

    Jack wasn’t cold

    In his grave before

    She done up & gave

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