It’s been a very warm, dry April in Santa Fe. But May has started windy and cold — it’s snowing as I type this and tonight there’s a freeze warning. The sort of Sunday when I’m inclined, after my morning coffee, to go back to bed with the crossword puzzle, the paper and a good book.
Last year, our first in New Mexico, I ignored our yard, as we were too busy renovating the inside of our house. But now that we’re mostly done, I have no excuse. I’m not much of a gardener, but I really have to do something about the large patch of dirt next to the front door, and the bushes and trees are crying out for pruning. So I’ve spent the last week identifying what we have and how to take care of each one. The web and local nursery have been helpful, but I finally had to admit that my 1980 version of the Sunset Western Garden Book was woefully out of date. So instead of spending the entire day in bed, I walked over to a local bookstore (Collected Works) to see if they had a newer copy. I’ve been there several times for poetry readings, and as luck would have it I serendipitously timed my visit for a reading: “A May Day Celebration featuring Poems on Flowers, Trees, Birds, Bees, and Crawling Creatures.”
As I was paying for the garden guide, I saw a postcard with the picture above, a website address and the title “Haiku Roadsign Project”. Looking it up when I arrived home, I found a kickstarter project for a group here in Santa Fe

We found a charming old roadside sign in need of a new purpose… (Our) project is to buy the sign and curate a series of Haiku Poetry. We will present 2 new poems (one on each side of the sign) each week for four months during the summer of 2011. Automobile passengers, bike riders, and pedestrians will enjoy poetry in consistently unexpected places throughout Santa Fe.

Pretty cool, I think. And despite the cold, made for a very nice end to the week, and an even better end to National Poetry Month.

To help me in my search for poetry in every day life, David Brooks wrote a column just for me: Poetry for Everyday Life. He elaborates on the idea of “pedestrian poetry” from Steven Pinker’s book How the Mind Works. Pinker writes that in our speaking we use “everyday metaphors that express the bulk of our experiences.” For instance:

Ideas are Food:
What he said left a bad taste in my mouth.
All this paper has are half-baked ideas and warmed-over theories.
I can’t swallow that claim.

Brooks basically says we are all poets and don’t know it:

Most of us, when asked to stop and think about it, are by now aware of the pervasiveness of metaphorical thinking. But in the normal rush of events, we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions. So it’s probably important to pause once a month or so to pierce the illusion that we see the world directly. It’s good to pause to appreciate how flexible and tenuous our grip on reality actually is.

Metaphors help compensate for our natural weaknesses. Most of us are not very good at thinking about abstractions or spiritual states, so we rely on concrete or spatial metaphors to (imperfectly) do the job. A lifetime is pictured as a journey across a landscape. A person who is sad is down in the dumps, while a happy fellow is riding high.

Most of us are not good at understanding new things, so we grasp them imperfectly by relating them metaphorically to things that already exist.

Reading some of the comments to Brooks’ column, I discovered Robert Frost’s 1931 talk delivered at Amherst College Education by Poetry, where he says much the same as Pinker & Brooks. Frost says “Education by poetry is education by metaphor.” and then

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, “grace” metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Certainly metaphors can be trite as well as ridiculous and laughable (just listen to most politicians), but I’m going to listen to my friends a bit differently this week, as if they are all poets.
{The photo with this post is taken from this blog post about a collection of six painted street crossings in central Johannesburg, done in 2007.}