Krista Tippett: Somewhere, you talk about being a 7-year-old poet making “petite discoveries.” I love that phrase. And again, “noticing,” right?

Shihab Nye: Oh, thanks.

Right, I like the word “petite.”

Tippett: Oh, it’s lovely. And there’s a poem you wrote about an onion:

“I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles,
crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,
pearly layers in smooth agreement,
the way the knife enters onion
and onion falls apart on the chopping block,
a history revealed.”

This is a way — again, we’re talking about poetry, but we’re also talking about a way of moving through the world.

Shihab Nye: Thank you for noticing that. But I think of something in an essay from William Merwin. And he’s lived in many places in his life — he lived in France, England, Mexico, Pennsylvania as a child. But he has a line where he says, “I learned from my neighbors everything they would tell me.” And I think that sort of appetite for knowing, that curiosity — “What grows here? What do we need to do? How can we improve this soil?” — that’s the way that he lived his whole life. And I think that’s what poetry does for our places, wherever we are. It allows us to cherish what we’re given.

[music: “Slate Tracker” by Blue Dot Sessions]

“Two Countries”:

“Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers — silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.”

[music: “Careless Morning” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: I know your poem “Kindness” has been really important for many people. It’s interesting that — would you kind of tell it? Because the backstory to that poem doesn’t sound like the circumstances under which you would write a poem about kindness. And so I’d love for you to just tell that story and then maybe read it, also.

Shihab Nye: Well, I really feel amongst all my poems that this was a poem that was given to me. I was simply the secretary for the poem. I wrote it down, but I honestly felt as if it were a female voice speaking in the air across a plaza in Popayán, Colombia. And my husband and I were on our honeymoon. We had just gotten married one week before, here in Texas, and we had this plan to travel in South America for three months. And at the end of our first week, we were robbed of everything, and someone else who was on the bus with us was killed, and he’s the Indian in the poem.

And it was quite a shake-up of an experience. And what do you do now? We didn’t have passports. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have anything. What should we do first? Where do we go? Who do we talk to? And a man came up to us on the street and was simply kind and just looked at us, I guess could see our disarray in our faces, and just asked us in Spanish, “What happened to you?” And we tried to tell him, and he listened to us, and he looked so sad. And he said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened,” in Spanish. And he went on, and then we went to this little plaza, and I sat down, and all I had was the notebook in my back pocket, and pencil. And my husband was going to hitchhike off to Cali, a larger city, to see about getting traveler’s checks reinstated — remember those archaic things?

Tippett: [laughs] Yes, I do.

Shihab Nye: Traveler’s checks.

Tippett: Vaguely, yeah.

Shihab Nye: I haven’t seen one in years.

Tippett: No.

Shihab Nye: And so this was also a little worrisome to us, because suddenly, we were going to split up — I was going to stay here, and he was gonna go there. And as I sat there alone in a bit of a panic, night coming on, trying to figure out what I was going to do next, this voice came across the plaza and spoke this poem to me — spoke it. And I wrote it down.

Tippett: [laughs] Wow.

Shihab Nye: I was just the scribe. So did you want me to read it?

Tippett: Yes, I’d love for you to read it.

Shihab Nye: “Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.”

One thing I’ve tried to say to groups over the years, groups of all ages, is that writing things down — whatever you’re writing down, even if you’re writing something sad or hard — usually, you feel better after you do it. Somehow you’re given a sense of, OK, this mood, this sorrow I’m feeling, this trouble I’m in — I’ve given it shape. It’s got a shape on the page now. So I can stand back, I can look at it, I can think about it a little differently — what do I do now? And very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. They always say, “I wrote things down, this isn’t quite finished, I need to work on it” — but they agree that it helped them see their experience, see what they were living. And that’s definitely a gift of writing that is above and beyond any sort of vocational — you know, how much somebody publishes. It’s an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it.

Tippett: And actually, I interviewed Mary Oliver last year, and she said — and by the way, she also described the poem “Wild Geese,” not as a voice coming to her, but basically as something that was just given. She said there are maybe two or three, but that one, she wasn’t even thinking.

Shihab Nye: That’s beautiful. And that poem is so important to so many people.

Tippett: Well, like “Kindness,” it’s a poem that saves lives. It’s a poem that saves lives.

Shihab Nye: It’s a poem that becomes like an emblem poem for people. Right. It is.

Tippett: But she always carries a notebook. That’s one of her trademarks. And she said to me, “If you don’t have a notebook, you don’t get it again. You have to write things down as they come to you.” [laughs]

Shihab Nye: That’s right. Absolutely.

Tippett: And so I’ve started carrying a notebook again, after 20 years.

Shihab Nye: Well, I think that’s great. And you can carry one at any age. You’re never too old to start.

Tippett: To start carrying a notebook.

Shihab Nye: Last week, I was in a classroom in Austin, Texas, where a girl who was apparently going through a really rough spell at home wrote a poem that was definitely tragic and comic both, about — everybody was yelling at her, in the poem, from all directions. She was just kind of suffering in her home place and trying to find peace, trying to find a place to do her homework.

But she wrote this in such a compelling way that when she read it — and read it with gusto and joy — there was such joyousness in her voice, even though she was describing something that sounded awful. When she finished, the girls in her classroom just broke into wild applause, and I saw her face — she lit up. And she said, “Man, I feel better.” And I thought, yeah, that’s — this is such a graphic example of putting words on the page. That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing.

Tippett: I was looking at A Maze Me, this book that you did, poems for girls, which actually echoes what you just said. You say, “If you have many voices and let them speak to one another in a friendly fashion, if you’re not too proud to talk to yourself out loud, if you will ask the questions pressing against your forehead from the inside, you’ll be OK. If you write three lines down in a notebook every day” — and then, in parentheses, “they don’t have to be great or important, they don’t have to relate to one another, you don’t have to show them to anyone” — “you will find out what you notice. Uncanny connections will be made visible to you. That’s what I started learning when I was 12, and I never stopped learning it.”

Shihab Nye: Right. And I think many people are encouraged to think you could write that little and still gain something from it; that you don’t have to be spending an hour and a half to three hours to five hours a day writing to have a meaningful experience with it. It’s a very immediate experience. You can sit down and write three sentences — how long does that take, three minutes, five minutes? — and be giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself, just finding out, when you go back and look at what you wrote.

And how many times we think, “Oh, I would never have remembered that if I hadn’t written it down — when and how did that even occur to me? I sort of like it, this week, and it could help me, and now I want to connect it to something else” — everybody finds that out, and just to encourage others to do it without a big, massive goal in front of them at all times.

Tippett: You’ve said that you read your son to sleep, and you also read him awake.

Shihab Nye: I did, yes.

Tippett: So what would you do? You’d go in and sit by his bed?

Shihab Nye: Well, when he was around 13, he said, “Mom, you don’t have to read to me anymore. I can read for myself.” And I said, “Yeah, I know. All the other parents I know stopped when their kids were like 8 or 9, and I’m still reading to you.” But he was sweet and gracious about it, and we did like that reading time at bedtime. And so I paused for a while — maybe a year, I wasn’t reading to him.

And then this farmer showed up in Oklahoma at a workshop and told us all that he had come just to listen. He just wanted to hear everyone read their work. And we thought, “Wow. Look at this: the wandering audience. He doesn’t even want to participate, he just wants to listen.” And he said, “No, listening is participation. It’s very important.” And he talked about being a child and being awakened every day by his granddad, who read to the kids in the house as a wake-up call, every morning — stood in the resonant hallway outside their bedrooms and read poems. And my brain clicked. I thought, “This is what I’ll do for the rest of the time our son is at home. I’ll waken him every day with reading poems.”

So we did that for years, and I think he really liked it. People I read a lot were people like Robert Bly and Lucille Clifton, Frank O’Hara for some reason, Chinese poems, Japanese poems. And we would occasionally talk about the poems. Later in the day, he’d bring something up about one of the poems I’d read. But I never did it so that we could have a particular conversation. I just did it because all parents have a moment in the day when you need to get your kid up, if they haven’t gotten up already, and most kids like to loiter in the bed there. So it was a pleasure to me to hear poems in the air, first thing in the morning, be saying them to our beloved son. And hopefully he’ll do that to his son, who turns one month old tomorrow.

Tippett: Wow. I like that too, because, as much as — my kids are also great big now, but as many lovely memories as I have of reading at the end of the day, you’re so tired at the end of the day. And it’s a nice idea to think about reading and poetry starting the day, when you’re fresh and when you would take it with you.

Shihab Nye: It’s beautiful — it feels beautiful. And you feel better — you, the reader, feel better. And there are also so many other places where this could be appropriate. I met a school principal some years ago, and he said to me, “Oh, I’ve always loved poetry, but I can’t really use it, because I’m just the principal.” I said, “What are you talking about? Where is the intercom in your school?” He said, “It’s in my office.” I said, “OK, well, do you have announcements?” “Yes, every morning.” “Well, why don’t you read a poem to start off the day for the entire school?”

And I sort of forgot about this encounter with him, and a couple years later, I went to that school, and I thought, “Wow, I don’t know what’s going on in this school” — I had forgotten that that’s where he was — “but these kids love poetry.” And finally one of them said to me, “Well, the announcements, every day, our principal reads us a poem, and so we carry poems with us every day. We have them in our heads.”

And one thing interesting was, he seemed to have needed a little push, since he didn’t see himself as a poet, that it would be OK for him to read a poem. Well, why not? And also, he needed a little push that he didn’t have to read the whole poem — like if he wanted to read just a stanza from Ralph Waldo Emerson or just “here’s a stanza from Walt Whitman,” that that was OK. You didn’t have to read the entire poem, if you didn’t have time. He liked that, but I think he just needed the encouragement.

Tippett: Before we draw to a close and also hear some more of your poems, I want to touch a little bit on your father again, just on this matter of refugees, which is so resonant now in the world…

Shihab Nye: It is.

Tippett: … in a new, desperate way. First of all, there’s the opening page of Transfer, where you’re kind of dedicating the book to your father, but you — the passage that starts, “Refugee, not always.”

Shihab Nye: Yes.

“Refugee
not always
once a confident schoolboy
strolling Jerusalem streets

He knew the alleyways
spoke to stones
All his life he would pick up stones
and pocket them
On some he drew
Faces

What do we say in the wake of one
who was always homesick?
Are you home now?
Is Palestine peaceful in some dimension
we can’t see?
Do Jews and Arabs share the table?
Is holy in the middle?”

And I think, many times the way immigrants — people look at immigrants with such a sense of diminishment, as if this person is less than I am because they’ve left their country. Well, I actually think they’re more than we are, because they’re braver. They’ve gone some other place. They have to operate in another language. How easy would that be? If I had to go to China today and start living in China and doing everything in Chinese, it would be very, very hard. So you think about the bravery of these people and the desperation with which they’re trying to find a realm of safety for their families and — just the basic safeties that we take for granted, every day we get up. And I don’t know. I don’t know how a world with so many resources and so many religious traditions and good hopes — how we can keep doing these things to one another in the world that create refugee populations. It just seems outrageous. Why is that happening so much?

Tippett: Well, I think that’s another one of those questions we have to sit with, if we can. Here’s just some lines from the “History” poem in that book, Transfer. “We were born to wander, to grieve, / lost lineage. What we did to one another / on a planet so wide open for doing.”

Shihab Nye: So wide open. So much we could do, always. So many surprising moves a person, a country could make that might be imaginative, that might encourage positive behavior instead of negative.

Tippett: And — I don’t know, maybe the magnitude of this moment forces us to rise to the occasion. We’ll see. Human beings do that every once in a while, too.

Shihab Nye: I hope so. I hope so, and I hope — that mysterious rising to one’s better self, which was a concept that really perplexed me as a child. My mother would say, especially if I’d been in some kind of mischief at school, which occasionally happened, because I wasn’t always focused on Jack and — who were those people? Dick and Jane.

Tippett: [laughs] Those boring — Dick and Jane.

Shihab Nye: Yeah, the boring Dick and Jane — I was trying to get away from them all the time. And so I would get in a little trouble, and my mother would say to me — her charge to me, “Be your best self.” And I would think, “Wow, what is that self? Where is it? Where is it tucked away? Where do I keep it when I’m not being it? And are you your best self? Is my teacher her best self?”

And that was just something intriguing to me, that we had more than one self that we could operate out of. And I think one nice thing about writing is that you get to encounter, you get to meet these other selves, which continue on in you — your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes — and find some gracious way to have a community in there, inside, that would help you survive.

Tippett: Yeah, that poetry as conversation — that’s right. Writing is a way of having a conversation between those different selves inside you.

Shihab Nye: Yes. That’s nice. I think so. And that’s a big thing. That’s not to be underestimated, that it’s important to do that.

Tippett: You write about so many places you go and that the word “gravity” is important to you. And it seems to me — it’s a big word for you, and it seems to me it’s often related to a sense of place. I don’t think it’s always just about place, but how would you — what does that mean, in your imagination?

Shihab Nye: Well, my father felt like a wanderer, like he was always wandering around. And I’ve always felt like a wanderer; that we have so many places we could explore and learn about. But I think you can feel all kinds of gravity, wherever you are, every day in different ways. And often, through human contact, you find your best gravity — a real conversation with someone, just a simple, simple exchange of words, can give you a sense of gravity.

I’ve always loved the definition for contemplation: “a long, loving look.” And when you take a long, loving look anywhere, you feel more bonded with whatever you’ve looked at. You feel as if you recognize it, you see it, maybe it sees you back, and you’re participating in a world where it exists. And so feeling that sense of gravity and belonging everywhere is very important to me.

Tippett: Well, claiming it, right? That’s what you do, I think. You claim it.

Shihab Nye: Claiming it — yeah, a kind of global passport, I guess it might be. And this young woman in Kuwait this morning, on the Skype class I did, she was saying that she was Palestinian — had never been to Palestine. Born in Jordan — had never seen Jordan. Was taken to Kuwait as a baby and raised in Kuwait, and now she was a college senior. And she said, “And I don’t belong to any of these places. And I feel so adrift. And I’m not accepted in any of these places.” And I said, “My hope for you would be that you could find a way to live, a way to be, a voice to use, where you feel at home in all of them.”

And I think there is a way to do that. As readers and writers, we find a certain home in books and language and literature — like I hear a Mary Oliver poem, and it’s as if I’ve been her neighbor, because I’ve read so many of her poems, even though I’ve never spent a day in her town. Maybe one day; some time. But so we abide with one another. We find, through images, ways to be together. So my hope for that girl was not that she would feel alienated forever from all her places, but that she could find a way to be so much herself and let those parts of herself continue the dialogue, through writing or through whatever she chooses to do. But I do think writing would really help, in her case — would help her to feel an identity.

Tippett: So your Palestinian refugee father, you say — and this comes through over and over again — but as you wrote about him after he died, you say: “He loved the world. The world frustrated him endlessly, but he loved it, and he hoped for it.” There’s this beautiful line, “He never gave up hope. Everything depended on mutual respect. The sadness of my father was a land mass under water.” I wanted to ask you about the substance of hope, for you.

Shihab Nye: Oh, thank you for asking that. Right now, living in Texas, it’s spring, and everything is bursting forth. I mean, things we had even forgotten we planted, things we don’t remember the derivation of — “Where did that come from?” — all these things are popping up and bursting open, and the air smells very sweet with this wonderful tree we have down here, called mountain laurel. And there’s kind of an intoxicating feeling of — spring opens up. All these flowers open their faces to the sky. And then we have the amazing fields and fields and miles and miles of wildflowers in Texas and just that sense of return, restoration, energy coming back out of the soil. And so I think the gift of daily life, which is our treasure as long as we live — hopefully there are days with all their simple tasks and errands to be fulfilled, but also moments of apprehension that are greater than those tasks and errands, or moments of apprehension that come through those tasks.

And people used to ask me a lot, when I was younger, “Why do you write about common things, normal, regular, little things?” And I said, “Well, what do you have in your life? I mean, I’m not living in Star Trek. I have common things in my life. What else do I have?”

But I don’t think that the things are, themselves, common. I think it’s a miracle that anything works. I think about the miracle of plumbing a lot and all the mysteries we don’t see under the soil — the pipes, the wires, the wireless connections now — just thinking about everything that’s going on, kind of like when you’re a child, fascinated by all the stuff that’s going on inside your body, and you didn’t have to tell it to do that.

Like I used to think, “My stomach is — I’m digesting right now. I didn’t have to tell it to do that. It just did it. That’s incredible,” or the heart beating, or the blood rolling through the veins. And you think, wow, all this stuff goes on. That’s not commonplace, to me. That’s miraculous. It’s amazing.

And so writing is a way that we’re continually — continuously restored to that. And reading other people’s work, being restored to that, how could you ever feel too old or too dull, in a world like that?

[music: “In Paler Skies” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate, through the Poetry Foundation, and professor of creative writing at Texas State University. Her books include Cast Away, The Tiny Journalist, and A Maze Me: Poems for Girls. Her newest book is Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Find all the poems she read this hour, and so much more, at the Experience Poetry page at onbeing.org.

Shihab Nye: “Cross That Line” is an important poem to me because I loved Paul Robeson so much, as a child. I loved his voice. We had a record of him singing. And I wouldn’t read his biography till I was an adult, and know about what he suffered as a so-called communist and how his passport was taken away from him and he was not allowed to leave the nation, though he had a huge fan club in Europe and elsewhere. So I thought this was so funny when he did this, and I now own a CD of this concert.

Tippett: Oh, really?

Shihab Nye: Yeah, someone sent it to me. It’s some archival recording. Pretty amazing.
“Cross That Line”:
“Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border
of the USA
and sang into Canada
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.
He sang into Canada.
His voice left the USA
when his body was
not allowed to cross that line.
Remind us again,
brave friend.
What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?”

[music: “In Paler Skies” by Blue Dot Sessions]