I came to loving poetry late in life when I realized what was happening when I read a great one. It was just as Emily Dickinson described:
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Hungering for THAT experience, I love finding poems randomly in unexpected places, beyond the usual books. This image of a W.S. Merwin poem tacked to a tree reminded me of that very serendipitous kind of beauty:
Here it is once again this one note
from a string of longing
tightened suddenly from both ends
and held for plucking
tone torn out of one birdsong
though that bird
by now may be
where a call cannot
follow it
the same note goes on calling
across space and is heard now
in the old night and known there
a silence recognized
by the silence it calls to
There is a subversive quality to poems randomly found, of words that have the power of a drug…
…to access mind and heart…
…as is Walt Whitman found on a tree:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid
and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
Part of the lovely mystery is the person who planted the poem…a gift given by a stranger who likely didn’t know who would find it…
Like Agustina Woodgate has been going into thrift stores and secretly sewing poems — here from the 8th century Chinese poet Li Po —inside the clothes.
I once came upon a block-long construction barrier plastered with poetry…
…
…and took some time to read them, astonished by the labor taken by a stranger on behalf of strangers…
There are many ways to become a poetry bomber…
An ordinary printer will do to print out all the poems you might want, to slip into someone’s pocket, or tape to a wall, or leave on a bench…
Artist Lisa Morphew loves to tape a poem onto any package she sends. Who knows who reads it on its way…?
Psychotherpist Rachel Fleischman’s email signature includes a poem...
A magnetic poetry kit will go far to transforming metal public signage…
And there are more formal efforts — installations really — done with planning and calculation, like these bricks hidden around the Central Park Zoo in New York City. They were part of a program created by Poets House to deepen public awareness of environmental issues through poetry.
…
I felt serious joy discovering all of them.
My love of that subversion inspired me to seed this webpage with poems…
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