The Sealey Challenge

We are dropping into your inbox today with an invitation for the remaining days of August: The Sealey Challenge.

As we mentioned in our latest episode on Diane Seuss, the Sealey Challenge asks us to read one book of poetry each day in the month of August. Such a goal is more achievable than you might think. Poetry books can be quite short. And the experience of reading one from beginning to end produces a whole new look at the work and how it all fits together. Poems speak to poems across the pages of a book. The experience of the Sealey Challenge is well worth the effort, and it can lead to wonderful discoveries every day.

As for ourselves, we have been diving into books by Diane Seuss, Jennifer Grotz, Philip Levine, and many more, and you’ll hear related episodes soon!

As you read, consider this excerpt from Abram Van Engen’s Word Made Fresh:

Because we bring so many different lives and perspectives to bear on a poem, a good poem bears out many different possibilities. Poems have an abundance that spills beyond any particular meaning or point. “One sign that a book has literary value,” W.H. Auden writes, “is that it can be read in a number of different ways.” We read it differently because we each read it through our own eyes. We meet it through our own ears. The personal, as the poetry critic David Orr writes, “has to do with how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we imagine others see us, how they actually see us, and the potential embarrassment, joy, and shame that occur at the intersection of these different perspectives.” As a result, no poet can know how their poem will land. Every life encounters it differently. We often find more in a poem than the poet knew was there. As Madeleine L’Engle explains, “When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist.” That more, that excess and abundance, comes to fruition in the many ways that we, the readers, make a poem complete.

We hope you enjoy your reading, and we look forward to more conversations.