A few days ago I placed two poems of encouragement in a pretty park in northern Michigan. I was thinking about the cave rescue of the Thai boys’ soccer team (just underway as I posted), but I was also thinking about all the dis’s in the world—the disheartened, the dispirited, the discouraged, the distracted—anyone in need of a boost, a push, a shot in the arm, a pep talk.
I myself am a lover of pep talks. Especially the poetry-style pep talks below.
poem is on sign, below the “O” of Information
Always Begin Where You Are
by Thomas Hornsby Ferril
Always begin right where you are
And work out from here:
If adrift, feel the feel of the oar in the oarlock first,
If saddling a horse let your right knee slug
The belly of the horse like an uppercut,
Then cinch his suck,
Then mount and ride away
To any dream deserving the sensible world.
The change from the title to the first line (“begin where you are” to “begin right where you are”) is encouragement itself. No need to position yourself, prepare or wait for the best time. Begin right where you are. In modern parlance, Just Do It.
But there’s a caveat. In poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s world you can’t just do any old dream that comes into your head. The images of rowing a boat and saddling a horse point towards pursuit of a realistic dream, a dream “deserving of the sensible world.” The Debbie Downer in me just loves that line. (I suspect I am not the only Debbie Downer who loves a good pep talk.)
Ferril’s horse terminology was unfamiliar to me, so I looked it up. Cinch his suck, I discovered, has to do with tightening the saddle on a horse. Horses suck in air when the saddle is first put on, and once they run around and exhale, the saddle is too loose and has to be tightened.
Thomas Hornsby Ferril (1986-1988) was born in Denver and lived out his very long life there, eventually becoming poet laureate of his home state. His poems can be found in the Colorado capitol building, poem fragments engraved under each of eight murals in the rotunda.
Ferril published six volumes of poetry and a collection of essays. He worked as publicity director for the Great Western Sugar Company for forty years, and he and his wife published the Rocky Mountain Herald for over thirty years. His daughter Anne was an artist and illustrator.
Carl Sandburg was a friend of Ferril’s and frequent visitor to his house (now an historic landmark). Sandburg said Ferril’s poems were “terrifically and beautifully American.” Even so, Ferril was not well known outside of the Rocky Mountain region in his lifetime, and sadly that still seems the case today.
poem is on middle post of pavilion
Famous
by Naomi Shihab Nye
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
Shihab Nye’s poem “Famous” is the antidote to fame, at least our current cultural obsession with it. At the risk of sounding like an old lady crabbing about Those Young People, it seems to me that too many young people seek fame as the only way to validate their lives. All you have to do is post a viral video on Instagram and ta-dah, you’re famous! But of course it isn’t so easy for most, and that creates a situation ripe for discouragement, what with all that anxiety about one’s place in the world and confusion about one’s purpose in life.
Maybe these lines could be handed out with every diploma:
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
Reminds me of what the nuns used to tell us in grade school, that we each had a special talent and we were to use that talent to give honor and glory to God. Even if our only talent was sweeping a floor, we were to sweep the floor the very best we could. In doing even a lowly task well, we would achieve something good and holy.
Naomi Shihab Nye, a favorite of mine, has been featured more than once at Poem Elf. I’ll re-post her bio from previous posts.
Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis and identifies as an Arab-American. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother American. During high school she lived for some time with her grandmother in Jerusalem and in San Antonio.
She’s written several books of poetry, children’s books, songs and novels. She has traveled for the U.S. Information Agency on goodwill tours. Her anthology for teens, The Space Between Our Footsteps, is a beautiful collection of paintings and poems from the Middle East. After 9/11, she spoke out against terrorism and against prejudice, and in 2002 she published a book of new and old poems she had written about the Middle East.
In 2009, PeacebyPeace named her a Peace Hero. I didn’t know such a thing existed, but it’s a wonderful appellation and something we can all aspire to be.
She’s won multiple literary awards, including four Pushcart Prizes. She lives in San Antonio with her photographer husband and son.
You can hear her read here, a “found” poem. Her voice surprised me. I had expected a voice soft and gentle like her face, but she sounds more like your best pal in high school talking too loud the morning after you got drunk together. Gravelly and fun.
Okay it’s a little literal, putting a poem with the famous line “I know why the caged bird sings” on a cage of birds. I could have left it somewhere that highlights the metaphorical nature of “Sympathy,” say in a book about slavery or taped to a Confederate statue (hard to come by in Michigan), but I yam what I yam, as Popeye would say. Not particularly subtle.
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was born in Dayton, Ohio, the child of former slaves. His mother taught him to read when he was four and always encouraged his education. His parents separated when he was a toddler, and his father, who had escaped enslavement before the end of the Civil War and fled to Massachusetts to fight for the Union, died when Dunbar was twelve.
Nathan Leonard (1924-2007) was born in California, served in the army and went to UC Berkley on the GI Bill. He earned a PhD in 1961 and taught rhetoric until he retired in his 70’s.
Poet, biographer, essayist, fiction writer, memoirist, and performer, Molly Peacock is one of those artists whose creativity can’t be contained in any one pursuit.
At age twelve poet William Earnest Henley (1849-1903) had a leg amputated because of tuberculosis of the bone. In his early twenties doctors wanted to amputate his other leg. But Henley sought out the famous surgeon Joseph Lister (pioneer in preventative medicine, eponym of Listerine) who used antiseptic techniques to save Henley’s remaining limb. While recovering in the hospital for three years, Henley wrote “Invictus,” Latin for “unconquered.”
A tall, muscular man with a red bushy beard and big personality, Henley was surprisingly agile on his wooden leg and cane. And here’s how you might know him: he was the inspiration for the most famous pirate of all time, Long John Silver from Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Henley, “I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver … the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.” …
His only child, Margaret Emma, lives on in literature as well. She used to call J.M. Barrie her “fwendy-wendy,” and so the character of Wendy in Peter Pan was born. Margaret Emma died of meningitis at age five.
I left “Invictus” in a co-working site in Detroit. No one took it down for a few days and as far as I know it’s still there. Maybe the poem will inspire confidence in a beleaguered entrepreneur wandering the halls.
Ljubomir Simovic was born in Serbia in 1935. He seems to be a writer-of-all-trades, a poet, a playwright, a television writer and short story writer. That’s as much as I can find out about him because all the info I found wasn’t written in English.
“. . . as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”
Charles Kenneth Williams (1936-2015) was born in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a salesman. Williams started his college education at Bucknell to play basketball, but transferred and graduated from University of Pennsylvania with a degree in philosophy and English.
Probably for the same reason I like the 
Franz Wright’s face is his biography. This is what a hard life looks like. But it’s a heroic face too, considering the suffering he lived with: beatings by his father, worse beatings by his stepfather, parental abandonment, manic-depression, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Like writer Mary Karr, his onetime colleague and friend, he overcame addiction and converted to Catholicism, finding some measure of stability in the last sixteen years of his life.