Dear Adie Ellis,
I don’t really have one Favorite Poem but quite a lot of favorite poems. Some poems seem so good that there couldn’t possibly be any poem better, and then one goes on reading and finds another poem one likes just as well. I think if I started listing my favorite poems, it might fill up your whole book — there would be poems by Shakespeare, John Donne, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Frank O’Hara, and a lot more. Also among my favorite poems are some written by the students I had when I was teaching schoolchildren to write poetry, like this one by Jeff Morley. He was in the fifth grade at Public School 61 in New York when he wrote it, I think in 1968. I had asked my students to write poems that were completely untrue — what I called “Lie Poems.” Some children wrote lists of funny, crazy things like “I was born on a blackboard,” “I fly to school at 12:00 midnight,” or “I am in New York on a flying blueberry” — but Jeff wrote about just one strange, and obviously untrue, experience. There was something about it that seemed true, though —
THE DAWN OF ME:
I was born nowhere
And I live in a tree
I never leave my tree
It is very crowded
I am stacked up right against a bird
But I won’t leave my tree
Everything is dark
No light!
I hear the bird sing
I wish I could sing
My eyes, they open
And all around my house
The Sea
Slowly I get down in the water
The cool blue water
Oh and the space
I laugh swim and cry for joy
This is my home
For Ever
— Jeff Morley
With best wishes,