For the past several weeks I have been asking friends,
family, and colleagues what poem they plan to carry for Poem in Your Pocket Day. While poetry is desirable to me all year
long, it’s lovely to have one month a year where we see an extra emphasis on
poetry. Adding to the pleasure is a day
of carrying and sharing poems for Poem in Your Pocket Day.
Today I am carrying Ode
to the Book II by Pablo Neruda. I
selected this poem because I really love Neruda’s poems, and I’m ruminating on
a summer when my husband and I enjoyed reading Neruda’s poems together and drinking
fine beverages from Chile. Since neither
of us read Spanish, we were careful to select translations we thought would be
reliable and settled on The Essential
Neruda: Selected Poems edited by
Mark Eisner. A City Lights Books publication,
the selection includes the poems written in Spanish on one side of the page and
in English on the other side.
Our Neruda reading summer bled into the fall when we
returned to school, and I found myself sharing Neruda’s poems with my
students. Because a large number of my
students were bilingual, I enjoyed listening to them read Neruda’s poems in
Spanish and then in English prior to our vibrant text-based class discussions. This classroom memory obviously stayed with
one student because she spent last semester (her senior year of college) in
Chile studying through an exchange program at the University of Kentucky. She posted a picture of Neruda’s home on
facebook and considerately tagged me in the post; she actually thought of her
former high school English teacher while she was in Chile!
Tomorrow I plan to share poem titles and thoughts on Poem in
Your Pocket Day 2012, so if you are reading and carrying a poem today, please tell me, so I can add you to my list of people who shared their pocket poems
with me.
