Hayden Saunier

poetry

Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, and her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and the Gell Poetry Award. Her poems have been published in journals such as 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Thrush, Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, and VQR as well as featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Verse Daily. Hayden is the founder and director of No River Twice, an audience-driven, interactive poetry performance group that offers performances that are never the same twice. Find her online at haydensaunier.com.

 

Reasons to Read

A mockingbird is singing his head off outside my bedroom window and even though Atticus tells Scout that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, Atticus shoots a rabid dog, so he’s not averse to violence when necessary, and this bird might be insane—running through his hopped-up repertoire of other birds’ songs, top speed, top volume, day and night, as if the privet hedge was an all-night karaoke bar. Not that I know about those. I’m no singer. I smoked too many cigarettes as a teen, and frankly, out of the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell says we need to master anything, I gave singing maybe twelve. My father’s antiquated field guide states this mockingbird behavior is either territorial or gleefulness in the search for a mate, which sounds like anxiety or mania to me and I, too, feel anxious, enough to rummage up a slingshot and dried peas, make shrapnel of the leaves, but because I’ve read him, studied him, watched him strut and fret across the walk, join forces with a house finch to harass the cat, perform his two-step, wing-fluff, insect-hunting dance, because I’ve learned that he calls out at night in fear or loneliness, I know him now, the way I know voices inside books— how he’s like me and not like me. How he sings as he must sing. The way I have to write. How summer will be over soon for all of us.

“ Working as an actor has taught me to trace an inner monologue, and I love capturing that in a poem. Here, an aggravating mockingbird led me, thought by thought, to how books and reading expand worlds, especially one’s own inner world, humbling and connecting us in the simplest ways. ”

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