A poet in January
January bliss: a comfy chair, poetry, and tea in a lovely cup given by a dear friend.
You’re invited to drop in and tell us your favorites– poets, teas, or both!
“When one reads a poet in January, it is as lovely as when one goes to walk in June.”
— Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
If you’ve been reading this blog very long, you know how much I love walking, especially in mild weather. But I think Jean Paul was right about poetry and January, which seem to go together like soup and snowy weather, or friendships and firesides.
Many of us who live north of the equator have been enduring record-cold temperatures. Some have been hit with a particularly nasty flu or other seasonal aches and pains. Power outages, weather delays and traffic snarls, along with wind chills below zero, can make wintertime something to dread. So let’s get cozy and enjoy what’s good about this season.
Brew a cup of your favorite cold-weather beverage. Pull up a comfy chair, light a crackling fire, or if you don’t have that kind of fireplace (alas, I don’t), try switching on your gas or electric fireplace, or just snuggle up with a warm fuzzy throw. Take out your favorite poetry book, or grab your laptop, tablet or phone and go on a poetry scavenger hunt for some wonderful undiscovered gems, or lifelong favorites you can’t fully remember.
If you find anything lovely, funny, thought-provoking or heartwarming, we’d love to have you share it with us here. For every comment that links us to a poem, I’ll answer with a favorite of my own for us to read. Our high school English teachers would be proud!
Let’s bring our virtual Verandah indoors while it’s too cold to be outside. What we lack in sunshine and warm breezes we can more than make up for in congenial online company and realtime hygge. Cookies, pastries and savory snacks optional.
This post was first published seven years ago. Little did I dream, when I first wrote it, that I’d be working on putting together a portfolio of my own (new) poems as one of my assignments at Oxford. I hope January is as good for writing poems as for reading them. But I find that reading poems is very good for writing them, or at least getting something down on paper that I hope resembles poetry.
The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: cold weather, comfort, cozy, friendship, hygge, January, poetry, reading, sharing, tea, warmth, winter
Defeat Despair 
Good morning, Julia! I had a strange poetry-related experience recently, related to Robert Lewis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Patrick find an old copy from the 80s and was going to send it to his great niece. In nostalgic expectation, I opened the book to read a few familiar poems. I was dismayed by one that i don’t remember ever having seen before! It’s titled “Foreign Children” and ends with “Don’t you wish you were me?”
Can differing editions of books with the same title have differing content? The illustrations were all different, but I expected that. Now I need to find the edition i have here, somewhere – to see if the offending poem was actually absent. I told Patrick, “I don’t think you can send that to Runa.” At least not at her tender young age. She’s a 5-year-old of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. Not that white kids should be given that, either, in my opinion. My thought is that it’s a topic that would need some sensitive explanation and maybe more maturity? I thought of removing that page, but that would be censoring, another practice that I generally dislike.
I am curious what your thoughts are, Julia?
Susan, as always there is MUCH I could say about this, but I’ll try to keep it to a few short sentences, all my OPINION, for whatever it’s worth:
1. From my standpoint, refusing to give a book you had wanted to give is MORE censorial than bowdlerizing the content (though I would not do either); at least if you mangled the book to remove history, you would still be allowing access to the other parts of the book that were less objectionable.
2. Yes, you’re on the right track to think more along the lines of leaving the book intact while being sure to discuss CONTEXT, at whatever age/stage she’s most receptive to it.
3. I had never seen that poem by Stevenson, but when I read it, I detect a bit of irony. He’s writing in the voice of a child, with all the limited understanding that implies. Perhaps you would find this article helpful:
https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/47_2/but_i_wouldnt_want_my_son_to_read_it.html#gsc.tab=0
4. I can’t begin to imagine all the ways future generations will judge and condemn us as being unworthy. After all, I see it happening already. Younger generations have ALWAYS looked down their (often overprivileged) noses at their “ignorant” forbears, who worked hard to create a world they take for granted.
Thank you so much, Julia! I have bookmarked that web page so that I can discuss it with the twins’ grandmother, Patrick’s sister-in-law. While my initial impression is that she’s proud to be fiercely protective of her hand kids, she may also be creative and open minded. Either way, I’ll get to know her better, by engaging in a dialog on this topic.
Love you!
Susan, I’ve found that engaging in RESPECTFUL dialog is always a win-win. Even if neither party changes their minds about anything, there’s a foundation of mutual understanding being built. Imagine how much better the world would be if people did not HATE others simply for disagreeing with them!
I agree, Julia!
It just occurred to me to imagine what a boring place the world would be if we ALL had the same favorite flower or favorite color.
Yes, a quote that was popular while I was growing up says “variety is the spice of life.”