At the Summer Solstice

In the opening assembly for my poetry residency with local fifth grade students, I posed this question: how many of you have driver’s licenses?  Puzzled looks all around and, of course, no hands are raised.  So you’re all ‘back-seat people’ then, I tell them – as are most kids, as I was once.  To be sure, there are certain benefits to being a ‘back-seat person’: you can read or daydream out the window or even nap, secure in the knowledge that some grown-up is being the responsible ‘front-seat person’, safely guiding you to your destination.  I see my students nodding their approval.

But then I go on, reminding them that Covid changed all that.  Suddenly we all felt we were back-seat people; that goes for your moms and dads too – and I was no exception.  We were praying that someone was in the front seat with their hands firmly on the wheel – some confident mind with the wisdom and the wherewithal to get us where we needed to go.  Can you remember those early days?  No one could relax; our very thoughts felt volatile, out of control.  We adults tried to occupy our minds and soothe fears with things like eating, drinking, and bingeing on Netflix – but the anxiety was stubborn and sometimes overwhelmed us.  So here I am today, making the case for poetry being a way to take a little bit of control over our minds.  Poems help us become ‘front-seat people’ – at least for the few minutes in which we are immersed in reading and thinking about a poem.  And, if you’re willing to make a creative leap of faith and take pen in hand, it can have that effect for the hour (or many hours) you spend composing a new poem.  I could declare to my students, with all honesty, that if I hadn’t available to me the daily retreat from pandemic anxiety into the oasis of words, I don’t know how I’d have survived.

In Joyce Peseroff’s fine new poem, we get a hint of that front seat/back seat duality.  We can feel the “fluid mystery” in which our lives travel – and, well into the third year of this global pandemic (with new variants still popping up each week like sparks in a sun-parched field), we find ourselves gazing up the road ahead, ever vigilant for unexpected dangers.  Reading her poem, I smiled and winced at the same time; yet, without even realizing it at first, I also took strength in recognizing myself in both the parental and child-like roles.  It reassured me I was not alone in my concerns – nor in my anticipation of a time when all this darkness would be firmly in our rearview.  At this time when the sun seems to hold still above us, centering our year, I too have the urge to ask: are we there yet?  Petition (published in 2020 in the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series) was Joyce’s sixth book of poems and was named a “must-read” by the Massachusetts Book Award.  She is also the editor of Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, The Ploughshares Poetry Reader, and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon.  She’s been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  In its early years, she directed and taught in UMass Boston’s MFA Program where she helped young writers learn how to steer within their own creations and to understand the undeniable value of empowered language – for writer and reader, adult and child alike.