Naomi Shihab Nye to Return as Westminster Poet

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet” (she’s spent the past 37 years travelling around the United States and the world giving readings, teaching, leading workshops and inspiring students of all ages). Nye is a prolific writer, the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes, including eight volumes of poetry (most notably “You & Yours,” a best-selling poetry book of 2006), three collections of essays (“Mint Snowball,” “Never in a Hurry” and “I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?”), two novels for young readers (“Habibi” and “Going Going”), two picture books (“Baby Radar” and “Sitti’s Secrets”) and eight prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers. Her book of poems “Honeybee” won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. The fall of 2011 saw the publication of two new books, “There Is No Long Distance Now” (a collection of very short stories) and “Transfer” (a book of poems centered on memories of her father).
 

Nye has won many awards and honors, including four Pushcart Prizes, the Golden Rose Award (presented by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry reading series in the country), a Lavin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has also been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow at the Library of Congress.
 

In October 2012, Nye was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. In her nominating statement, Ibtisam Barakat, one of the jurors, wrote, “Naomi’s incandescent humanity and voice can change the world, or someone’s world, by taking a position not one word less beautiful than an exquisite poem.” Barakat went on to say, “Naomi’s poetry masterfully blends music, images, colors, languages, and insights into poems that ache like a shore pacing in ebb and flow, expecting the arrival of meaning.”
 

As the daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye’s poems are wide-ranging in subject matter, technically accomplished, and full of magic and mystery. Whether she’s remembering her Palestinian grandmother or her own childhood in St. Louis or thinking about her neighbors in San Antonio or strangers halfway around the world, Nye always keeps the focus on the beauty and vitality and meaning of the everyday and ordinary experiences all humans share.
 

Teachers who were at Westminster in 2007 remember Nye’s visit as perhaps the best of all the Westminster Poets’ visits. Students will be preparing for her visit by reading a variety of her books, including “Honeybee,” “Red Suitcase,” “There Is No Long Distance Now,” “You & Yours” and “Transfer.”
 

Below are links to a few relevant Web sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Shihab_Nye
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/naomi-shihab-nye, and
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174.
 

And for a preview of Nye’s reading style, here’s a poem she read a few years ago at the Dodge Poetry Festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJ3FP8aDjY.
 

Finally, below are a few sample poems for what promises to be an incredible return visit by Naomi Shihab Nye.
 

Different Ways to Pray
 

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.
 

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.
 

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.
 

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.
 

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
Time? — The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.
 

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.
 

Making a Fist
 

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges
 

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
 

'”How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
 

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
 

So Much Happiness
 

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . . .
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.
 

I’m sorry you lost your father, people say,

and I step outside to soak

in stripes of gray cloud.

Hand touches iron rail.

You needed it, I don’t.
 

Blood circulating under skin

and time, that blurred sky shifting.

Air holds everyone, visible or not.

Slice of lemon you craved by your teacup.

Strange affection for chipped ice.
 

Maybe the right wind brings

a scent of smoldering twigs,

fresh water over stone.

Maybe tonight your laughter

carpets our rooms.

I keep finding you in ways you didn’t know

I noticed, or knew.
 

Every road, every sea,

every beach by every sea,

keeps lining up with what you loved —

Here’s a line of silent palm trees.

It’s as if you answered the phone.