Response to 'Ernest Mann'

Naomi Nye starts this poem by saying, “You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.” She’s saying that poetry is not fast food, it’s slow food: we should take time to write or read a poem because a lot more thought and care goes into it.

Another point is that Nye’s poem doesn't read the way most of us imagine a poem reads, with rhyming lines and such. This poem is more like a letter or a story. In fact, it is a type of letter: “Anyone who says, ‘Here’s my address, write me a poem,’ deserves something in reply.”

In this ‘letter’ Nye writes: “Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes they are sleeping. They are the shadow drifting across our ceiling the moment before we wake up.” What she’s saying is that poems aren't obvious and that we have to dig deep into ourselves to find their meanings.

She also uses this poem to show us how incredible the world is when we open ourselves up to new ways of looking at things. For example, most of us think that skunks are smelly and gross, but the man she describes (I think it’s the man in her title, Ernest Mann) finds poetry in a skunk’s eyes. Ernest is the opposite to the boy in our last poem, “The Little Boy,” because he is a non-conformist. Nye write of him: “Nothing was ugly just because the world said so.”

My mom always says to me that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Nye says this in a much more poetic and beautiful way. And she reminds us not to prejudge, not only people, but everything in the world.