Books of Poetry And New Year's Resolutions

The new year has arrived. We all know what that means. After we woke up with a hangover from our new year's celebrating, we opened up the paper and read the long list of what is "in" and what is "out." We nodded at some, laughed with others, and were generally glad to have a day off work. And now, it has hit us like a wild baseball pitch: the new year resolution. Ugh. Not that again.

We have a love/hate relationship with resolutions, don't we? We love to hate them. On the one hand, we see them as insignificant ill-attempts to make our lives better. On the other hand, they make our lives better.

Here is a novel idea as a new year's resolution: give your friends and family books of poetry. This may seem like an odd resolution, and that's because it is. Giving a gift seems more like an idea for the holidays. New year's resolutions were designed to make our lives better. I'm going to lose weight this year. I'm going to stop smoking. I'm going to finish that novel.

Being a lover of poetry, how would it seem to others if I gave poetry books for Christmas? "Oh, he's giving gifts he would like; he's not thinking about what I might want."

I finished a weekend-long personal development course back in November, and one of the things that was brought forward by the instructor is that the "self" goes beyond the individual — the "self" and the "community" are one. This idea inspired a thought: what if the new year's resolution was a resolution for the "self/community" instead of just me ("individual")? In other words, by giving to others, I am also giving to myself.

So, buying books of poetry for others as a new year's resolution is a gift to me, and it is a gift to the person I have bought it for. They may not like poetry, or they may be vaguely interested. But that's okay with me. Even if it takes a year for them to take that book off the bookshelf and blow the dust off the cover, if they read any part of it, and even like some or all the poems inside it, that is a great gift to me, and so much more powerful than "I am going to stop drinking soda."

If you like this idea as well, but don't know what you would buy, here are a few (inexpensive) books of poetry I can recommend:

Ants on the Melon — Virginia Hamilton Adair

77 Dream Songs — John Berryman

After Oz — Michael J. Bugeja

Ballistics: Poems — Billy Collins

Complete Poems — Ernest Hemingway

A guest poet by Joshua Gray