Free Market Flavor

This chapter reflects on the poetry of the palate, which it says is part of our palette of personal and cultural expressions. Tasting your favorite dish and hearing your favorite poem both have aesthetic qualities that make part of the poetry of everyday life. A language of tastes from immigrants' home countries is a marketable currency—and it adds not only flavors but also delicious words to our English vocabulary. Two books by Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and Salt: A World History, make the case that the entire history of the world can be told through a single food. Foodways can provide a lens through which to explore geography and cultural history. In New York, world history, immigrant history, and shifting demographics create an ever-changing range of eateries and restaurants offering a panoply of tastes, often concocting new flavors by mixing ingredients.

Laughter for Dessert

The author reflects here on the important role that laughter has played in his life. His brother Murray laughs harder than anyone else he knows—and he caps it off by clapping in wild applause. The author's daughter, Eliza, once quipped: “We had laughter for dessert.” He even imagined a mystery story in which the murderer kills by devising a perfect joke that convulses people with laughter till they die. He also can remember a girl whose infectious laugh inspired a poem entitled Lily. His friend and Ping-Pong partner Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, is a student of humor; he also teaches a class in humor theory at the University of Michigan. And like many long-married couples, he and his wife have developed routines for their own personal comedy team of sorts. The author adds that banter is a key ingredient of folk culture and family folklore.

Intimacy in Language

In this chapter, the author considers poetry in family expressions, which, along with in-jokes and associations, are packed with alliteration, rhythm, and hyperbole. The author recalls how he was drawn to folklore because, even at an early age, he was aware of the beauty and power of folklore in his own life. The author grew up as an American expat in São Paulo, Brazil. His parents, Shirley and Irv, belonged to that notable group called sojourners—those who immigrate but never fully assimilate. He shares his experience with a song called “Red River Valley,” which he says inspired his love of folk music and also played a part in his becoming a folklorist and meeting his future wife, Amanda, a fellow folklorist. Besides the song, a few other incidents contributed to the serendipity of meeting Amanda. The author remembers a time when a conversation between him and Amanda shifts from prose toward poetry, a moment that highlights the importance of intimacy in language.

Navigating Transitions

This chapter considers the poetry underlying rites of passage. Throughout the life cycle, the complex cycling and recycling of customs and rites of passage is reminiscent of the classic children's toy the Slinky. Along with the rites of passage that mark linear time, seasonal customs and holidays shape a sense of cyclical, recurrent time. Rites of passage are the mileposts that guide travelers through the life cycle. In 1909, ethnographer Arnold van Gennep compared tribal rituals in different parts of the world and noted the similarities “among ceremonies of birth, childhood, social puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies and funerals.” All these rites of passage, he observed, consist of three distinct phases: separation, transition, and incorporation.

Poetry on the Porch

In this chapter, the author recalls how his family would spend afternoons and evenings reading poems on the screened porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and the sea in a rented house in Garden City, South Carolina. His father-in-law, Lucas, eagerly anticipates those times, bringing along his 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But they all bring a few poems to the porch—even the children. At age ten their nephew Aidan Powers came equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poetry. Masterpieces and ditties are treated with equal weight: poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron are interspersed with children's poetry and nonsense verses. The evenings of poetry reading on the porch at the beach were so enjoyed by the family that they spawned poetry nights in the Dargan living room back in Darlington, South Carolina, on a weekly basis.

Days of Chess and Backgammon

The author here considers the games of chess and backgammon. The author shares how he became fascinated by chess, intrigued by its philosophical side. He was twelve years old in 1959, when Bobby Fischer won the United States Chess Championship. As a folklorist, he did field research on chess havens in New York's West Village, interviewing the players in Washington Square Park and at the two warring chess clubs on Thompson Street, Chess Forum and the Village Chess Shop. He talks about the Capablanca table; José Raúl Capablanca, world chess champion from 1921 to 1927, is said to have won the World Chess Championship on that table. Fischer also played on that table, in New York in 1965. Chess, the author observes, seems to lend itself to grandiose metaphors. Metaphors abound in the down-and-dirty trash talk exchanged by the chess players in New York City parks. The author concludes by recalling how he and his father would engage in a gentle competition playing online backgammon games.

Introduction

This book explores the poetry of everyday life and relates it to folklore, with the objective of helping the reader to maximize their capacity for artistic expression. It asks how we can tap into the poetics of things we often take for granted, from the stories we tell to the people we love, or the sports and games we play. It considers how poems serve us in daily life, as well as the ways poems are used in crisis situations: to serve people with AIDS, or as a form of healing and remembrance after 9/11. The book also looks at the tales and metaphors of scientists as a kind of poetry that enables us to better understand the universe around us. It includes a section dedicated to art in the human life cycle and explains the author's own conception of “the human unit of time.” Lastly, the book suggests ways to tap in to the artfulness and artistry of our own lives and how to find audiences for your work, to share your vision with the world.

The Poetry of Ping-Pong

In this chapter, the author looks at the poetry of Ping-Pong, his favorite sport. According to Marty Reisman, the game of Ping-Pong died in Bombay, India, in 1952. Reisman, nicknamed “The Needle,” was favored to win the World Table Tennis Championship that day. The author says he has always loved Ping-Pong because you can get into a rhythm, hit the ball back and forth across the net for hours, with any racquet, and simply talk. Ping-Pong, like poetry, is a players' sport, not ideal for spectators. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, claims that there is palpable humor in the game. With Ping-Pong, the author insists that we are all capable of attuning ourselves to the hidden life of sports, a relationship that is about kinesthesia and embodiment.

Kindred Spirits

In this chapter, the author shares the wisdom and wit of some extraordinary people, the “kindred spirits,” as well as the lessons he has learned from each of them, such as Tony Butler, who made his home in the tunnels of the New York City subway; the photographer Margaret Morton, who took pictures of the structures where many homeless people live in the tunnels and under the bridges of Manhattan; Ethel Mohamed, a seamstress who began to embroider her memories after the death of her Lebanese husband; Moishe Sacks, a retired baker and the unofficial rabbi of the Intervale Jewish Center in the South Bronx; Kewulay Kamara, from whom he learned about how an ancient mythology can shape a way of life far from its indigenous roots; former medicine show doc Fred Bloodgood; the young subway graffiti writer Skeme; and Mae Noell, from whom he learned about publishing, finding your voice, and sticking to your guns. The author concludes by recounting some wonderful expressions he has picked up from his travels.

Rock and Word

This chapter suggests that building a stone wall offers a lesson in poetry. The experience of writing a poem embodies a joyful feeling: the words take your shape as you wander through creek beds of syllables, with your own life rolling over them. Stones, like words, are everywhere; the trick to building a dry stone wall is to find stones that fit perfectly into one another and form a structure that will not collapse under its own weight. Stone walls, despite being made of one of the heaviest objects on the planet, all have a lightness and delicacy in the way the stones touch and balance. The best poems—made of the lightest things on the planet (words)—demonstrate a sturdiness, with the words coupled so perfectly that one cannot be removed without the whole structure crumbling. Writing a poem requires balancing sound, humor, feeling, and thought to support one another.