For nearly five decades, Naomi Shihab Nye has been entertaining poetry audiences through her moving, insightful poems, both in performance and in print. Nye is as much a poet in performance as she is on the page. Her spoken-word command of audiences holds them in thrall and invites their applause. It’s really not so much command as intimate engagement, felt partly through her personal warmth and partly through the profound humanity she expresses in her poems.
Nye has published more than 30 books for adults and children, and has won countless awards, among them four Pushcart Prizes, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Robert Creeley Prize, and the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award. She has also been a Guggenheim Fellow.
At Featherstone Center for the Arts on the evening of June 3, Nye worked her poetry magic once again. The occasion was a joint fundraiser for Pathways Arts and Featherstone in which Nye read her poems, interspersed with entertaining commentary and, toward the end, a Q and A session, followed by a book signing.
This is the third time Nye has visited the Vineyard to read her poetry at Featherstone, but this time, she said, it feels different. She was referring to the air of uncertainty and bewilderment many people feel in the political moment. On the Vineyard, Nye said, she could feel a kind of peace, and a reverence not just for the beauty of nature, but for life in all its shapes and forms. As she sat in the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs earlier in the day and looked about her or walked by the water, observing people sitting on benches and talking, the spirit of this place brought to her a special feeling. That’s something Vineyarders recognize so well.
As Keren Tonnenson of Pathways began videotaping the event, the sold-out audience in the Francine Kelly Gallery seemed eager for things to begin. You could feel the anticipation. Featherstone’s Ann Smith opened the event by calling out Nye’s well-known love for the San Antonio Spurs, who are in the NBA Finals and would be playing later that night. Ann Smith also thanked Fan Ogilvie (who could not attend) and Justen Ahren for bringing Nye and literary arts to Featherstone. Poet and novelist Jennifer Smith Turner introduced the poet and spoke about the role of poetry to help us see each other more fully — and the way poetry is feared by the politically powerful.
When Nye took the microphone, she began by talking about the Spurs, but soon turned her remarks to the natural kinship she has known all her life between the Palestinian and Jewish people. “What can we all do together?” she said. “I feel I’m still writing out of that hope.”
She began with the poem “Double Peace,” dedicated to the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
Nye went on to read others, including a new poem “still in handwriting” called “Bridging,” which she’d written for the 28th Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge on June 1. Recent personal losses in her family, including her parents and son, had moved her to write the poem. Nye recalled that her dear friend W.S. Merwin, or “William,” advised her to keep talking to them (her parents): “No reason you should lose both sides of the conversation.”
She went on to read poems from “Grace Notes,” dedicated to her mother. One interesting side note was Nye’s reference to Ashley Bryan, author and illustrator of 70-plus children’s books told from the African American experience. Ashley Bryan was, it seems, a very close friend of her mother’s, as she amusingly recounted it.
Nye continued to entertain the audience with a reference to the blue dress she was wearing, a new dress as it turns out, the first new dress she’d bought in years. After the Bridge reading in New York, a friend told her, “You cannot go to Martha’s Vineyard in those old clothes.” And so she bought the cheery, bright blue dress she was wearing.
Nye’s hilariously absurd poem “Medicare Wellness Test” brought the house down, and then after a story about viewing Walt Whitman manuscripts, she read “Walt Whitman’s Revisions,” showing her love for the good, gray poet and father of free verse.
Finally, after a very funny poem about her early children’s book writing, Nye invited questions from the audience.
Nye closed the reading with a requested poem, the widely acclaimed “Gate A4.” Thunderous applause in a standing ovation gave the audience the chance it needed to show its appreciation, love, and respect for the poet. As she left the microphone, Nye shouted back at the audience, “I carry your spirits with me. Go look up Ashley Bryan!”
Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent books are the intimate “Grace Notes: Poems about Families” (2024) and “Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems” (2022). “Sidekick,” a new selection of poetry from BOA Editions, is scheduled to publish on Sept. 1.