Featuring essays and poems by HANNAH FRIES, CECILIA LLOMPART,
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, and CECILY PARKS

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Introduction

By HANNAH FRIES, Guest Editor,
AND ROSE MCLARNEY, SHR Editor

These days, if you lean out of your boat to grasp the moon’s reflection, you’d better have your tongue planted firmly in cheek (according to some). Poets have been criticized for having too many birds in their poems or, yes, for having a little heart-to-heart with the moon. And yet the elemental things that have inspired poetry and song for millennia still do—and who’s to say good poems can’t come of them?
     Irony has been in vogue of late. Perhaps it’s time to bring back the wonder.
     Here, we’ve gathered a group of poets to contribute personal essays, selections of their original poems, and additional recommended readings to this conversation (maybe with the moon; certainly with what they find meaningful).

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In Defense of Wonder

By HANNAH FRIES

“Perhaps our separation from the natural world—and our ignorance of it—is in part what fuels such a suspicion of the elemental, the earthly, and the avian in poetry.”

PLUS TWO POEMS: “It Is Not Enough” and ”Epithalamion”

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Moonlight

By CECILIA LLOMPART

“The suit-and-tie side of poetry—that which would call itself academic and pretend that poetry belongs to an elite class of the educated and edified—tends to shun the mystical, even though the mystical may very well be the sheen that sets poetry apart from the other arts.”

PLUS TWO POEMS: “Nine Ways of Looking at the Moon” and “Bat (in Spring)”

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Whale Song and Starlight:
Making the Case for Wonder

By AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

“We didn’t have cable, so at night, my father brought us out into the driveway with his bulky telescope perched on a piano bench, tilted it down to my eye level, and taught me how to catch Saturn in the eyepiece, how to find the Seven Sisters dancing in the inky sky. I came to understand only recently what a gift this was. There is no sky under which I feel lonely.”

PLUS A POEM: “Celebrate the Silence”

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Conversations with the Moon

By CECILY PARKS



“Then came November 9, 2016. Mama, why are you sad? my daughters asked. Then, days later, came the big, bright supermoon compelling all of us into the night.”

PLUS A POEM: “When I Was Thoreau at Night”