World Poetry Day! - Jesse Paris Smith
Today March 21, is World Poetry Day, a UNESCO International Day which ‘celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity.’ Started in 1999, this day is recognized and celebrated by any and all, as we are all connected by the word, all able to share in the honesty and grace of the poem. With each word precisely chosen, the poem has the power to radiate a sense of humanity.
We’ve just arrived in Portugal, and I’m writing from my room in a tranquil hotel that was once a convent - a place of contemplation, prayer, devotion to the word. A perfect place to think and write, a perfect place for World Poetry Day.
In a previous post called Lost Things and Found Things, I shared a little about my own relationship to poetry, a few of the poets I admire, and some of my own poems, including text, videos, and audio recordings. There is a video of me reading poems chosen for World Poetry Day 2021, along with the printed text. Please visit the link if you are interested! You can read it all, or if you scroll towards the bottom, after my Eagle ring, you will find all of the poetry content. Here also is another post with pictures and links to the books I read from in all of the videos.
To celebrate World Poetry Day today, I wanted to do 3 things. Firstly, I wanted to write this Substack post to honor and share about this special day. Secondly, I wanted to write a new poem. And thirdly, I wanted to make a serious pledge to myself to make dedicated strides in editing and completing my poetry collection which has been waiting patiently for me in its folder for long enough. Well the post is shared, a new poem is written, and here before you as witness, I make a fresh commitment to work on my collection of poems in 2024. ✋🏻
"Arranged in words, coloured with images, struck with the right meter, the power of poetry has no match. As an intimate form of expression that opens doors to others, poetry enriches the dialogue that catalyses all human progress, and is more necessary than ever in turbulent times."
-Audrey Azoulay, Director General of UNESCO
Do you have any routine, method, or practice for the way you write? When I wrote most of my poems, my mind was turned off and the words flowed like a connected channel of energy. I really don’t like to think very much while writing them, as they are more feeling/sensory based. So I would get a charge to write, then after the full poem was flooded out, that’s when it’s time to turn the brain back on, go back and fine tune, shifting words here and there until the feeling is right. If you read the Lost and Found Things post before, you might know that my relationship to poetry got a little disjointed, and I took some time away from writing. This is precisely why I wanted to write for World Poetry Day. So today I did an experiment, writing in a different way than I am used to. I based this on a series of videos I made in 2021 for Hedgebrook Writing Residency, an incredible community and residency program on Whidbey Island in Washington state, and of which I’m proud to be an alumna from the 2018 Songwriter’s Residency. The videos I made were for the Fall edition of their Grief + Healing Series which featured ‘Hedgebrook alumnae instructors leading 4 pre-recorded (asynchronous) videos, each 5-15 minutes long. The videos detail a ritual or spiritual practice created and/or used by the instructor to process grief or encourage healing, leading to a creative writing or journaling prompt.’ For my contribution, I made a series of 4 videos called ‘The Elements of Grief and Remembrance’ which included meditations, explorations, and writing exercises. This experience was deeply meaningful to me, in fact my profile picture on Substack is actually a grid of screenshots from these exact videos. :)
For one of the writing prompts, the instruction was to create a structured poem or song lyrics by pulling words directly from a flood of free-writing, such as a lengthy journal entry or expressive letter. That is how I chose to write my poem today. I opened a long letter I had written last summer, and pulling some favorite sentences, I pasted them together in order on a new document. Then going in with an editing comb, I pulled out excess words, trying to be as concise as possible, deleting unnecessary thoughts, even when it felt painful to do. It was a really interesting exercise, a different way of writing poems than I’m used to, and certainly felt a little uncomfortable. I learned a lot and I’m glad I tried it out. I’m still editing and will continue to - it’s not polished or groundbreaking, but I want to share it with you and I’m thinking (hoping) that maybe it will inspire you to try the same. I would LOVE to hear about your process and experience if you try it out! Remember, practice not perfect, process not product. Creating and doing things for the experience, not the outcome - for how it feels not what it looks like – mindsets we desperately must continue to practice and encourage each other to embrace more than ever before. <3
Do you think you will give it a try? Is there another writing exercise you can do? Maybe something outside of your comfort zone that you haven’t attempted before? How will you celebrate World Poetry Day? You can share a favorite poem, poet, book - you can write a new poem or share one of your own that you wrote in the past. You can make a pledge, set a goal, anything that feels good for honoring and recognizing this day today. I look forward to reading anything you would like to share!
Thank you for being here. Please feel free to share this post with your community if you like <3
Jesse’s poem experiment for World Poetry Day:
Prompt: Write (a new one) or Find (previously written by you in the past) a long form, expressive free-write. It can be anything such as a letter/email (sent or never sent), a journal entry, or even an essay. Start a new document on the computer or get a blank paper. Going through the piece of long-form writing, pull out your favorite sentences. Put them together in the new/blank document. Go back in and continuously fine tune, delete, pull things out, until you get the basic outline of a poem. Then you can edit even more, becoming more concise, shifting the language, changing words out for different sounding ones, etc. See how this process feels and what you come up with.
Questions: After you get a draft of your poem, read it out loud. Does it have the same meaning and feeling as the original text? has it changed completely? What did you learn about yourself in this process? What did you learn about your writing in this process? Anything else to share?
Jesse’s poem (based from a written letter from July 14, 2023)
*
It’s late now in the evening,
When it’s nice to imagine that
Everyone is home.
Where the energy is contained
In a cube of movement,
Evidence of previous creations
Adorning the floor like laundry
There’s broken glasses and
early portraits becoming torn
Beneath the tired pillow
There’s circus equipment
Awaiting attention
A package to be sent tomorrow
And empty sheets tucked behind the desk,
Ideas for another day.
*
Outside the door,
The day is peaceful.
Streets of old spirit
lead slowly towards the park,
The magical park
Where I found liberty at sunset,
Where sheltered by weeds
I tasted true rest.
There was no dwelling or pine,
No future or past.
I showed Orion’s Belt
Like a bracelet across my wrist
And found Pluto on a little finger.
There were only details,
details upon details,
more infinitesimal and present
with each turn of the golden hour.
*
Last night,
I ventured out to see what the world was doing,
And beholden to the glowing city,
I traveled the spectrum of everything.
Laughing with the whistler,
Crying with the lonely fool,
Intimidated by the presence of the empress,
Ignoring advice from the hierophant,
Giving my last coins to the magician.
Then sitting beneath the Tower of Stars,
Without the patience of the upside-down one,
I longed to hear the arrival of the chariot,
Any chariot,
Going any direction,
Impossible when led by impulse and disquiet,
merely shadows of terrified fools ourselves.
*
I long to be something worth writing letters about
Rooted by the respect of slowness,
Pulled roughly each day by the urgency of preciousness.
I long to mould something that
endures the waves of time,
grounded by the reality of earth,
and floating in the etheric space,
as permanent as things in the world can be.
There’s dithering and insistence
in the cyclical nature of creation,
where we must not accept or even embrace,
but truly *love* and live the image of
impermanence and imperfection.
The storms are scary:
But we need them.
It’s the reason to stop the needless
fretting about legacy and enjoy
fully the gift of breathing:
the shallow and the deep.
The lightning and the light.
*
Long before the winding stairs
And the candle lit table,
Before the broken pages
Or the one red button
On the blue chore coat -
Before it all,
This entered deep into my being.
It opened the door as though it
Were home, walked right through
And looked around the rooms
to see they were painted new.
I trust in the hand of everything
To give answers without questions,
To paint sheet music in the air
To sense with all planes and bodies
The harmony of totality.
To listen to the dissonance,
to iron out the perfect,
to find the wrinkles of wisdom which
teach the nuance lessons we cherish most.
*
Each day, we experience the spectrum of everything.
Together we have cracked open doors,
broken down walls,
excavated archeological sites,
identified precious gemstones,
and fought like hell to keep them safe.
As I explore the aggregate,
I will keep them secret inside my pack
Hold them close and learn their elements
Find an environment or build a habitat
fit for them to shine and glow for others,
To remain shielded from destructive materials
Or any attempt to be grabbed by the darknesses
And greeds of the world.
But the thing about gemstones,
Is they are products of the Earth,
formed by pressure over millions of years and
Brought to the surface by extreme explosion.
They are precious in their rarity,
And they are resilient and strong.
*
So when hunger takes over
Or my faith is wavering,
I’ll close my eyes and think of
liberty at sunset.
The restorative medicine.
The cube of movement.
The importance of the storms.
As for today,
I sent my mind on vacation
so I could play the ancient game.
Starting with
Orion’s belt like a
bracelet across my wrist
and
Pluto still a planet,
if only on a little finger.
Happy World Poetry Day!! Thank you so very much for reading. Looking forward to reading your words and recommendations. Please share anything in the comments! Favorite poems, poets, your own poem written in the past, or a new poem you wrote today! All the very best to you from this little room in Portugal.
Held every year on 21 March, World Poetry Day celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity.
UNESCO first adopted 21 March as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard. World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media. As poetry continues to bring people together across continents, all are invited to join in.
The Poets’ Corner at St. John the Divine
The American Poets' Corner was created in 1984 to memorialize American writers of the highest repute. It is housed in the extraordinary confines of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City and modeled after a similar alcove for writers at Westminster Abbey in London.
Visitors come to the Cathedral’s American Poets Corner, located in the Arts Bay on the north side of the nave, curious to see who’s honored, to admire the stones, to pay homage. Poets, fiction writers, essayists, and dramatists: the American Poets Corner memorializes the literature of our nation in all its surprise, wit, and beauty.
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