Because of my advocacy work for my mentally ill daughter I have come in contact with some wonderful poets who also happen to struggle with schizophrenia. Pamela Wagner is one of those people and she is also one of my favorite poets, along with Leonard Cirino. It was Pamela and Leonard who introduced me to reading poetry.



HOW TO READ A POEM: BEGINNER'S MANUAL

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated properly by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma
and steel-tipped boots,
your blue collar misunderstandings.


Do not assume there will be meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it
in common language.

To read poetry requires only courage
enough to trust yourself and take a leap of faith.
The burden of proof rests
on the poem.

Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later on it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry is not a god, demanding blind
obedience to doctrine and creed.
Yet sacrifice is key --
for what is a poem if it is not language
doing holy things to the ordinary,
looking anew and making the commonplace sacred?

Read one poem a day, come high water or hell.
Someday you may open a book of poems
by choice by surprise.

When you can name 5 contemporary poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you start exceeding your assigned quota
and don't even notice,
you must close this manual.
Congratulations.

You can now read poetry.


--By Pamela Spiro Wagner
Twin Realities (a book Pam wrote with her identical psychiatrist twin sister)





THE PRAYERS OF THE MATHEMATICIAN

�rise without sound
primes uttered like a rosary's
beaded polynomials of devotion
climbing the sky towards a god
unknowable as the dark infinity
between rational and irrational
numbers. His hair in a wild corona
framing eyes so deep-set
they seem to drown what's caught there,
knowing the hardest questions
may sometimes answer
he wanders the halls
pale and abstracted as pi,
trailing numbers in chalkdust
like the spectral footprints of a ghost
no one remembers passing there,
these incandescents of his faith
illuminating all the unsayables
as only equations can
in brief yellow chalk on a green board:
that life yearns towards binariness
that our ending is in our beginning,
that if we name as nouns
the verbs he numbers in strictest silence
our dualism's just as binary:
good or evil, pure or profane,
we only constrain what he sets free
with his meticulous 1s
his careful and perfect 0s.


--By Pamela Spiro Wagner


Based on the story of John Nash, before the
film "A Beautiful Mind" was released.


(Winner of the 2002 BBC World Service Poetry Competition)