Reader

Wendell Berry

Happy National Poetry Month from Common Good Collective. Launched in April 1996, by the Academy of American Poets, it reminds the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters. On this last day of April, we are devoting this reader to poetry.

Building community in a diverse, fragmented society is like the work of poetry. A poet makes connections among words. A poem joins unlike things, and in the joining, creates new ways of seeing. One skill needed for building community is the ability to see how two, unlike things, when joined together, could create something unique in the world. The task is to always remember, even in moments of confusion and despair, that, as Maggie Smith writes, “you could make this place beautiful.”

Reading poetry is a practice for building community. It requires patience. The gifts of a good poem reveal themselves slowly, over the course of several readings. Often, new insights are gleaned best with another person or community with whom to read and poem. And a multiplicity of meanings comes forward in poems, just as it does on any block in any neighborhood.

Slowing down, paying attention to details, and empty spaces, expecting an abundance of meaning and gifts: all the things that make poetry important also make for good community building work. The meaning and gifts of our blocks, and the sorts of work we need to do together, become apparent when we slow down and listen to our neighbors. The abundance of gifts packed into every line of poetry and every block of a city or town offer themselves as gifts when we pause to listen and to receive. Read more

Maya Angelou

A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing. Read more