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    Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners
    Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners
    Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners
    Ebook187 pages1 hour

    Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners

    By Naomi Shihab Nye

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “Nye once again deftly charts the world through verse.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

    “A beautifully constructed, thoughtful, and inspiring collection.”—School Library Journal (starred review)

    Young People’s Poet Laureate and National Book Award Finalist Naomi Shihab Nye’s uncommon and unforgettable voice offers readers peace, humor, inspiration, and solace. This volume of almost one hundred original poems is a stunning and engaging tribute to the diverse voices past and present that comfort us, compel us, lead us, and give us hope.

    “I think the air is full of voices. If we slow down and practice listening, we hear those voices better. They live on in us. Inspiration? We need it every day. We deserve it. It is essential, like food, water, clean air, shelter. Here are some poems celebrating the voices that have changed my life and continue to do so.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, Award-winning poet and author

    Voices in the Air is a collection of almost one hundred original poems written by the award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye in honor of the artists, writers, poets, historical figures, ordinary people, and diverse luminaries from past and present who inspire her and us. Full of words of encouragement, solace, and hope, this collection offers a message of peace and empathy.

    Voices in the Air focuses on the inspirational people who strengthen and motivate us to create, to open our hearts, and to live rewarding and graceful lives. With short informational bios about the influential figures behind each poem, and a transcendent introduction by the poet, this is a collection to cherish, read again and again, and share with others.

    Featuring black-and-white spot art throughout, as well as brief bios of the “voices,” an index, and an introduction by the author.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 13, 2018
    ISBN9780062691866
    Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners
    Author

    Naomi Shihab Nye

    Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and she spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than forty years traveling the country and the world, leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty books. Her books of poetry for adults and young people include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners; Honeybee (winner of the Arab American Book Award); Cast Away: Poems of Our Time (one of the Washington Post’s best books of 2020); Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other volumes of poetry include Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; Fuel; Transfer; You & Yours; Mint Snowball; and The Tiny Journalist. Her collections of essays include Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven. Naomi Shihab Nye has edited nine acclaimed poetry anthologies, including This Same Sky: Poems from Around the World; The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems from the Middle East; Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25; and What Have You Lost? Her picture books include Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and her acclaimed fiction includes Habibi; The Turtle of Oman (winner of the Middle East Book Award) and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan (honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award). Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Award, and ""The Betty,"" from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry-reading series in the country. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, including The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and she also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty years and served as poetry editor at the Texas Observer for twenty years. In 2019–20 she was the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters named her the winner of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019–21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Naomi Shihab Nye is professor of creative writing-poetry at Texas State University.

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      Book preview

      Voices in the Air - Naomi Shihab Nye

      Introduction

      Poet Galway Kinnell said, To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.

      Someone—Abraham Lincoln?—once remarked that all the voices ever cast out into the air are still floating around in the far ethers—somehow, somewhere—and if we only knew how to listen well enough, we could hear them even now.

      Voices as guides, lines and stanzas as rooms, sometimes a single word the furniture on which to sit . . . each day we could open the door, and enter, and be found. These days I wonder—was life always strange—just strange in different ways? Does speaking some of the strangeness help us survive it, even if we can’t solve or change it?

      Where is my map—where are we, please? Can voices that entered into our thoughts when we were little help us make amends with the strange time we’re in?

      William Stafford, great twentieth-century American poet and teacher, tireless encourager of dialogue and nonviolence, is still speaking in the slant shadows falling across the path. If we only knew how to listen better, he said, even the grasses by the roadsides could help us live our lives. They’re flexible, for one. What might he say about our current moments in history? Would he be surprised by the divisive rhetoric, mysterious backsliding? Or not surprised at all?

      When I see a highway sign, No Right Turn onto Whirlwind Drive—Stafford comes to mind. He carried a decisive calm.

      Peter Matthiessen, the only American writer ever to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, is still standing out on his Long Island beach, staring at the sky, asking us, Did you see that? Flying over just now? Did you catch the span of the wings, the rosy tip of the head?

      Might we pause on our way to everywhere we are rushing off to and hear something in the air, old or new, that would make sense?

      Not so long ago we were never checking anything in our hands, scrolling down, pecking with a finger, obsessively tuning in. My entire childhood did not involve a single deletion. These are relatively new acts on earth.

      In those archaic but still vivid days, there might be a meandering walk into trees, an all-day bike ride, a backyard picnic, a gaze into a stream, a plunge into a sunset, a conversation with pines, a dig in the dirt, to find our messages. When we got home, there was nothing to check or catch up on—no one speaking to us in our absence.

      Recently, when I had the honor of visiting Yokohama International School in Japan to conduct poetry workshops, student Juna Hewitt taught me an important word—Yutori—life-space. She listed various interpretations for its meaning—arriving early, so you don’t have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a mistake. Starting a diet, but not beating yourself up if you eat a cookie after you started it. Giving yourself the possibility of succeeding. (Several boys in another class defined the word as when the cord for your phone is long enough to reach the wall socket.) Juna said she felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more yutori—a place to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.

      I love this. It was the best word I learned all year.

      Not that sense of being nibbled up—as if message minnows surround us at all moments, nipping, nipping at our edges.

      Perhaps we have more voices in the air now—on TV, in our phones and computers and little saved videos—but are we able to hear them as well? Are these the voices we really need? Is our listening life-space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?

      Can we go outside and listen?

      In 1927 Freya Stark, an English writer born in Paris in 1893, who would become known for her astonishing travels through even the most remote parts of the Middle East, paused for a picnic near some Roman ruins outside Damascus. She wrote, We ate our food with little clouds of Roman sand blown off the hewn stones and thought of the fragility of things. Near Baghdad she wrote, . . . in the morning all is peace, and all went out to pasture. The camels, looking as if they felt that their walk is a religious ceremony, went further afield; they are comparatively independent, needing to drink only once in four days; the sheep and goats stayed nearer. And when they had all gone, and melted invisibly into the desert face, the empty luminous peace again descended, lying round us in light and air and silence for the rest of the day.

      Freya Stark’s light and air and silence feel palpable in her paragraphs. Her respect for people unlike herself, her fascination with worlds very different from the European ones she had grown up in—yet fully recognizable in their humanity and hope—heartens me when my own time feels too odd to bear. Her curious voice traveling through the air is more comforting than people currently claiming power, demanding recognition, trying to make others feel as if they don’t belong. Literature gives us a home in bigger time.

      But how do we find our ways home? Continually, regularly? With so much vying for our attention, how do we listen better? Reminding ourselves of what we love feels helpful. Walking outside—it’s as quiet as it ever was. The birds still communicate without any help from us. In that deep quietude, doesn’t the air, and the memory, feel more full of voices? If we slow down and intentionally practice listening, calming our own clatter, maybe we hear those voices better. They live on in us. Take a break from multitasking. Although many of us are no longer sitting on rocks in deserts watching camels, sheep, and goats heading out to pasture, we could sit. In a porch swing?

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