Valentine for Ernest Mann

“Valentine for Ernest Mann” spans four stanzas and 29 lines of free verse, beginning in the perspective of a speaker who has received a request to mail a poem to Ernest Mann. The speaker’s tone is casual and intimate, and she uses second person to directly address Ernest (and by extension the reader), telling him “You can’t order a poem like you order a taco” (Line 1). Beginning the poem in this casual, almost humorous way, Nye establishes the everyday speech she’ll continue to use and signals to the reader that this won’t be a traditional romantic valentine poem. The occasion prompts Nye to consider and examine the questions: “what is a poem?” and “where can one find a poem?” Her tone supports Nye’s overarching claim that poetry is both possible and present in a wide range of places, especially in those places that might initially seem unexpected or unpoetic.

The expanded simile in the first stanza establishes the grounded yet witty tone of the poem with the assertion that one can’t order a poem like a taco and “expect it to be handed back to you / on a shiny plate” (Lines 3-4). Nye selects tacos, an ordinary food item that is easy to order without much thought, as the comparator for a poem to establish the difficulty of the task Ernest has asked of her. A taco is straightforward, easy to find, and easy to customize. When looking for tacos it is easy to articulate what you want. With poetry, Nye claims, the dynamic is more nebulous.

She continues the convivial tone in the second stanza, telling Ernest “Still, I like your spirit” (Line 5), noting that even though he has made an unreasonable request of her, she still thinks it is a request worthy of a response. Instead, she says, she will tell him a secret: “poems hide” (Line 9). They hide in ways that are difficult to find or grasp: “In the bottom of our shoes, / they are sleeping. They are the shadows / drifting across our ceilings the moment / before we wake up” (Lines 9-12). The image she chooses utilize the language of sleep, implying that these hidden poems exist in numerous places and that it is incumbent upon Ernest (and her readers) to seek them out and wake them up. Nye then explicitly tells the reader: “What we have to do / is live in a way that lets us find them” (Lines 12-13). She clearly states the responsibility of the reader, claiming that in order to have access to poetry, one must not simply look for it but actively change the way one lives one’s life in order to become open to seeing poetry. The language of sleep not only adds a gentle, mystical quality to the hidden nature of the poems but also personifies them, further illustrating that they are alive and available to engage and connect with.

Nye further illustrates her point through the tale of the man who gives two skunks to his wife on Valentine’s Day. The wife responds by crying which puzzles him, since he “thought they had such beautiful eyes” (Line 17): Nye puts this line in quotation marks, allowing the man’s voice to come forward, giving it weight and preparing the reader to take him seriously despite the absurd context. The speaker herself acknowledges the need to clarify this confusing action when she says “And he was serious. He was a serious man / who lived in a serious way” (Lines 18-19). This repetition reinforces Nye’s use of casual speech, creates intimacy with the reader, and acknowledges that the man’s actions are out-of-synch with the expected cultural notions of Valentine’s Day. The second half of the stanza asks the reader to fully consider the man’s actions and perspective. For him “Nothing was ugly / just because the world said so” (Lines 19-20). Here Nye introduces the possibility of cutting through cultural norms to experience something in a different way. The man “re-invented [the skunks] / as valentines and they became beautiful” (Lines 21-22); his ability to ignore conventional notions of beauty allowed him to creatively engage with the natural world, allowing him to manifest a new kind of valentine. Because of this, “the poems that had been hiding / in the eyes of the skunks for centuries / crawled out and curled up at his feet” (Lines 23-25). The poems within the skunks, despite a centuries-long hibernation, are still vivid and dynamic, and the man’s ability to see them granted them waking life. This example vividly illustrates Nye’s message that even the most seemingly bizarre, ugly, or downright morbid elements of life contain an innate beauty, poetry, and even sweetness, if seen through the right lens. Throughout the rest of the poem, Nye ultimately asserts that these small instances are not simply eccentric examples of poeticism in action but are the very essence of poetry itself.

In the final stanza, Nye offers a suggestion to the reader: “Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us / we find poems” (Lines 26-27). She wants the reader to find inspiration in the skunk story, to look for things that are otherwise ignored, or thought of as ugly or useless. “Check your garage,” she writes, “the odd sock / in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite” (Lines 27-28). By including both the inanimate object as well as the person, Nye introduces a spirit of empathy to the poem. The reader should not just re-frame how they view non-human things, but also other humans. Nye ends with the line “And let me know” (Line 29), cementing the intimacy with the reader and inviting a personal relationship. Poetry is not only what we find on “the bottom of our shoes,” (Line 9) but also, at the most fundamental level, the sharing of those findings with other humans.