Poetry Watching

people watching with the express intent of finding the poetry in it all

I don’t really interact with children all that much. A byproduct of working from home & living in a city that’s not super easy to navigate with a child in tow. I see them in the park every day though. Every time I do, they have a way of snapping me into presence.

On Sunday, I was walking through Prospect Park drenched in sweat proposing a plan to the person I was with. I want to come back to the park one day just to people watch and collect little pieces of poetry flying through the air.

A week ago, I saw a tiktok of a man listing off things he had heard people casually say that sounded like poetry. The words stick in his head and play like music. Sometimes, people even speak in iambic pentameter without realizing it.

He remembers silly little moments. His father saying “there were nachos for days, it was nacho night” about an entire table full of chips and cheese. A woman passing him on the street lamenting a missed trip. A mother wrangling her sons at a bagel shop. he says “my world stopped,” about the little turns of phrases that came out of their mouths. He frames all of this as a joke and I hope he fits it into one of his stand up routines because it’s genuinely delightful.

But I want words playing like music in my head like that and I like to think I don’t have to find them on a page.

So I make a plan with the person I walk with. I think of it as poetry watch. People watching with the express intent of hearing accidental prose. “Not necessarily today though,” I add because my ass cheeks are sweating and I’d like to find my way back to an A/C as soon as possible.

Moments later, moving towards the park’s exit, we see a little boy run in the opposite direction of his family. His father, with the little boy’s scooter in hand, yells “this way!” but the boy keeps going. After a few moments, with siblings trying to convince him to change course, his father exasperatedly says “you’re using a lot of energy to go in the wrong direction!”

I lock eyes with the person I’m with immediately. “There’s one!” he says. For a second, I feel powerful. Like I conjured up this moment with this father. I willed the casual wisdom he projected across the sidewalk into existence. More likely though, there are pockets of poetry in every moment if you attune your attention to them. It’s exhilarating to have this made clear to me just moments after bringing the idea of poetry watching up.

The day before, I watched as a toddler’s attention got stuck on a crushed Pepsi can. His mother cooed “which way?” effectively asking the kid a question he was completely uninterested in. “No touching, that’s yucky,” she said to him as his hands reached for the trash, hungry for all of it’s sticky shine.

This moment felt like poetry in a different way. Poetry that’s not spoken, but seen. Poetry before words.

I start a section in my digital garden to store these moments. I’m struck by the similarity in the first two. The parents making futile attempts to lead the children. The children making their own decisions, exerting their own energy even if it’s a “waste,” towards whatever it was they were actually interested in.

I wonder, if I keep track of these pockets of poetry, what they will tell me over time? I wonder if the similarity of these moments is some sort of clue. A clue to what mystery, I’m not entirely sure. One thing I have learned about myself in the few days since I started thinking about this is how immediately children bring me to the present moment. It’s like their attention and aliveness is contagious.

I’m enamored by this idea of poetry watching, yet mostly, I forget to keep up with it. I’ve got earbuds in. I’m consuming content on the way to the grocery store instead of consuming my life.

I have a podcast, so I should probably be careful not to discourage people from listening to podcasts too much. I love podcasts, but maybe it’s worth it to take the headphones out once in a while. Maybe it’s worth it to hear the people around me, to let them remind me to remember my own life.

As Joan Didion says in her essay On Keeping a Notebook, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” And those moments that feel so small are actually so packed with details and dialogue we’ll be remiss to forget in the years to come. She says, “you see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.”

Let us put the poetry in our pockets, then there will be no need to improvise our picture of the past.