Poetry

This chapter suggests that Christmas poetry offers readers a way to become intimate with a loving, elegiac, mysterious, and communal emotional experience particular to the season. With reference to poems by Maya Angelou, e. e. cummings, Toi Derricotte, T. S. Eliot, Martín Espada, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Jennings, Peter Larkin, W. S. Merwin, Christina Rossetti, Evie Shockley, Sufjan Stevens, and W. B. Yeats, the chapter argues that only poetry can capture the magical, incantatory, and holy spirit of the Annunciation, Advent, Christmas trees, Christmas Eve, Epiphany, and Christmas Day. Poetry’s oblique and indirect expression is ideally suited to a series of feasts and fasts that culminate in an event that replaces our desire for empirical reason and reassurance with the joy, wonder, and love of uncertainty and faith.

The POEMobile Dreams of Peace

This chapter describes the POEMobile, an art truck with brightly painted iron wings arching above its roof and poems in two dozen languages emblazoned on its sides. Jointly sponsored by Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore, the truck projects poems onto walls and buildings, combining live poetry readings and musical performances in neighborhoods throughout New York. As poets perform in their native languages on the street or plaza, a beam of light soars past them and the words float in light above their heads, often several stories high. The projections open with an animated feathered wing brushing words onto the building, an idea inspired by a Martin Espada line: “God must be an owl, electricity coursing through the hollow bones, a white wing brushing the building.” The door of the POEMobile is inscribed with lines of poetry in some of the world's endangered languages.