Even if the poets do not know it themselves!įrustrated with the multitude of confounding answers, Arthur returns to Leon’s fishbowl only to find him sound asleep beneath his large stone, enveloped in seaweed. A poem? grandpa says, tugging on his mustache and looking worried. When you put your old sweater on backwards or inside out, dear Arthur, you might say that it is new again.Ī poem turns words around, upside down, and - suddenly! - the world is new.īut grandma encourages Arthur to ask his grandfather, too, who “often writes poems … instead of repairing pipes.” Just then, Arthur’s grandmother arrives and is met with the same question, which she answers after thinking hard, evidenced by the way “she always smiles a silly smile when thinking.” Perhaps she is a visual allusion to Aristophanes’s play Assemblywomen, or perhaps she represents a muse, whom Tallec invokes to remind us that the muse hides in many guises and reveals herself in the most improbable of places. Our imagination is left to ponder why, on the next page, the cage contains not the yellow canary but a red-haired woman, who sings Aristophanes’s answer. A poem is when you hear the heartbeat of a stone.Īrthur hastens home to check on poor Leon, who appears to be asleep, “floating gently amidst the seaweed as if thinking.” And because this is the sort of story in which a canary can only be named after an Ancient Greek comic playwright, Arthur next seeks an answer from his canary named Aristophanes, “who is no bird brain.” Mahmoud offers his answer with easeful conviction: When you eat it, a little is always left over.Īrthur turns to his neighbor next, “old Mahmoud who comes from the desert and waters his rhododendrons every morning at 9 o’clock.”
Round, who echoes Thom Gunn’s insistence that “poetry is of many sorts and is all around us,” rather than something reserved for the special formal class of “poets.”īut I know one, and it is hot like fresh bread. Next, he visits his friend the baker, Mrs. A poem, Arthur, is when you are in love and have the sky in your mouth. Each person along the way contributes to Arthur’s tapestry a different answer, infused with the singular poetic truth of his or her own life. So begins the wonderful meta-story of how poetry comes into being as a tapestry of images, metaphors, and magpie borrowings. Lolo knows everything, laughs all the time, and is always in love. He searches in the closet and under his bed, but the vacuum cleaner and the dust balls have no poem, either.
Puzzled and unsure what a poem is, Arthur goes looking in the pantry, only to hear the noodles sigh that there is no poem there. Written by the French poet, novelist, and dramatist Jean-Pierre Simeón, translated into English by Enchanted Lion Books founder Claudia Zoe Bedrick (the feat of translation which the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska had in mind when she spoke of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes … a second original”), and illustrated by the inimitable Olivier Tallec, this poetic and philosophical tale follows young Arthur as he tries to salve his beloved red fish Leon’s affliction of boredom. And as it does that, it shines a sidewise gleam on the larger question of what we most hunger for in life and how we give shape to those deepest longings. This Is a Poem That Heals Fish ( public library) is one such vitalizing gasp of loveliness - a lyrical picture-book that offers a playful and penetrating answer to the question of what a poem is and what it does. But what is a poem, really, and what exactly is its use?Įvery once in a while, you stumble upon something so lovely, so unpretentiously beautiful and quietly profound, that you feel like the lungs of your soul have been pumped with a mighty gasp of Alpine air. “Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating the cultural power of poetry.
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