What poetry collections would the Disney Princesses be reading?

What poetry would the Disney princesses be into?

1. Tiana 

This one is going first because it was the most straightforward. For me, The Princess and the Frog is, yes, a love story, but it’s also a love letter to New Orleans. Tiana wants to open her restaurant because of her father, but also because she genuinely loves the people of New Orleans and wants to feed them delicious food. So I think she would be reading a (my current favorite) collection of poems by the poet laureate of New Orleans, Ms. Mona Lisa Saloy’s Red Beans & Ricely Yours. This book is about Saloy’s family as much as the city, but even in poems clearly about people, New Orleans is inescapable. It’s very clear that the city has . . . is shaped too cheesy of a word? Defined? Gifted? . . . The city has gifted these characters their quirks, their virtues, their vices. I won’t say they’re a product of New Orleans, because they shape the city in return as well, but it’s hard to extricate even the character sketches from the city. Everything comes back to the Crescent City. And isn’t that how it is for Tiana? Yes, her adventures lead her to the bayou, but her journey starts and ends (happily ever after) in New Orleans. My favorite poem in the book is “Summer in New Orleans,” which doesn’t oversimplify the messiness of the city, but enjoys it, the “red beans and rice [that] raise the Monday / blues to rhapsody,” the “New Orleans of sunshine / and novenas, prayers of petition / and thanks for favors,” of “Louisiana pines, rain for / Camellia blooms even in winter, / and in summers of heat and showers.” Tiana would definitely own a signed copy of Red Beans & Ricely Yours. (Naveen would buy it for her, I’m sure. I don’t think he would love poetry, but he would make sure she had a signed copy, if that’s what she really wanted.)

2. Pocahontas 

Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem is about the Mojave tribe, while Pocahontas belongs to the Powhatan tribal nation. However, I think Pocahontas would relate to what Diaz says. The language Diaz uses is very simple and evocative, but the poems themselves are not simple—not unlike Pocahontas.  They’re . . . natural. They move like water, a comparison I think Diaz would agree with. It’s simple enough, but it has a way of moving at its own pace, in its own way. It’s not controllable, it’s not always safe, but it’s vital to life. There’s a long section where Diaz reflects on the Colorado River, “the most endangered river in the United States—  / also, it is a part of my body.” She is quick to say this is not a metaphorical, visual comparison. She means “river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now” because “In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for for land. In conversion, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-,” sometimes meaning “both” at the same time. Isn’t this like when Pocahontas is trying to explain to John Smith that she has no concept of owning land, that rather she sees everything as being “connected.” Granted, what Diaz means is deeper than just “connection.” She means that she is the river, the river is her. To poison or constrain one, is to poison or constrain the other. Maybe Pocahontas would be inspired by Diaz. I definitely think she would be a fan. 

3. Elsa

This one was tricky. Elsa is such a loner, so seemingly remote, but so affectionate and loyal toward her sister. What poet truly understands that? Then—the answer came. Love & Solitude by Edith Södergran is a collection of poems expressing how it feels to be isolated from the world, but unable to keep from reaching out to it in poetry, resentful of judgmental others, but also unable to stop loving them, the beautiful world they inhabit. The edition I’m reading is a translation from Swedish by Stina Katchadourian. There’s one poem that just feels like “Let It Go” to me— “Song from the Cloud”: “Up on the clouds dwells everything I need: / my daylight-certain imitations, my lightning-quick truths, / and on the clouds I dwell myself / — white, in blinding sun, / inaccessibly joyful, waving farewell. / Fare thee well, green forests of my youth. Monsters haunt them now — / I will never set my foot on earth again.” Isn’t that Elsa-coded? Then there’s this: “Nordic Spring”: “All my air castles have melted like snow, / all my dreams have run off like water, / all that remains of what I’ve ever loved / is a blue sky and some pale stars.” Elsa could have written that in the nadir of despair, after finding Anna frozen. Besides, Södergran loved cats and photographed hers frequently, and Elsa always seems like a cat person—she’s aloof, impossible to win over, but very affectionate and warm toward those she feels safe with. 

4. Jane

This may seem like a punny answer, but I mean it sincerely: Sarah Linday’s Primate Behavior is perfect for Jane. The book is about the thin line between animal and human behavior, and how difficult it is, when you really consider what drives you, to separate yourselves neatly from apes.The book also has kind of a late-Victorian, early-Edwardian feel, with different early scientists and circuses described. Granted, there’s a vein of the grotesque in this collection that isn’t reminiscent of Jane (although I love it), but there are moments that just feel so like her. In “By Luristan to Thule,” an unnamed woman “finally became separated from her pack / with its twenty pencils, the notorious hat, / coins and aspirin, equally useless, / and yielded to discovery of one state / that lacks the primary luxuries: return, / and the safely delivered story.” Like the unnamed woman in the poem, Jane loses those supposed markers of her humanity—her British-style clothes, her encumberment of trunks and possessions, but perhaps she gains, by the end of the movie, a different humanity: love, family, a new home. She forgoes the neat narrative of expedition, danger, and return to safety, in favor of radically reconsidering what makes her happy and in so doing, consents to let other people tell her story, consider her lost. It’s okay; she’s found something better. Besides, I think Jane would relish this collection’s attention to detail. She loves drawing animals, getting each aspect right, and Lindsay does the same, but with a twist, always taking you somewhere you didn’t expect. You find yourself relating to dragons, a lungfish, circus elephants. Maybe they’re more human than you are, or does suspecting that make you all the more human? 

5. Jasmine

This is maybe cheating, because I think Jasmine would relate most not to a collection of poetry, but to a poet who is widely published (but hasn’t yet written a full book of poetry). Fatima Jafar is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and she writes about the world in a way I think Jasmine would understand. There is this underlying current of deep, stubborn love for the world, almost in spite of its obvious problems. That is the essence of Jasmine to me: this hunger to throw herself into Agrabah, this desperation to experience the world that, despite the disillusionments that follow, never really leaves her. In her “Velvet,” published in Wasafiri, she writes so lovingly about her niece, “five months old, velvet / cheeked, perfectly rosed and just-plump like an apple in / my arms,  . . . she observes the hot lights flashing / across the city, moves her head to get a better look, to drink / it all.” Her “August” reminds me of how she must have felt in the city after meeting Aladdin, all about enjoying a city that is burningly hot, enjoying the simple right to be imperfect, free, and in love. 

6. Snow White 

My first impulse when picking a collection for Snow White (my favorite Disney princess) was Cate Marvin’s Fragment of the Head of a Queen, which has a massacred cartoon Snow White on the cover. But Marvin (as much as I appreciate her) doesn’t really evoke Snow White in the collection. So I turned to Anne Sexton, whose Transformations has poetic retellings of many fairy tales, including Rapunzel and Cinderella. But I’m picking her collection for Snow White 1) because I can and 2) because her rendition of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” is my favorite version of the story. Her language is simple, but potent, almost deceptively straightforward, until you stop to really consider it. For example, when the Queen “condemned Snow White / to be hacked to death” because “Pride pumped in her like poison.” Each word is individually familiar, as is the story of Snow White. I know what’s coming next. And yet, I’ve never thought of the wicked Queen as being that violent, that corrupt, but isn’t she? She does order Snow White’s heart carved—”hacked”—from her body, and what else is she but prideful? It puzzles me that Sexton describes Snow White, upon arriving in the dwarves’ cottage, as eating “seven chicken livers / and [lying] down, at last, to sleep.” But I appreciate that she’s showing a princess, sometimes inhumanly perfect, as being hungry after a long journey, as eating something that sounds as gross as “chicken livers.” Because Snow White is a really gothic, dark fairy tale in some ways, and Snow White inhabits a flawed, gothic world. It wouldn’t make sense for her to eat neat little cakes. No way—this princess understands the grotesque beauty of scarfing down some chicken livers in the home of seven strangers. And Snow White is gothic—The Queen is malevolent, and Snow White is choked to death, and then, in the end, the Queen dances to death in red-hot iron shoes. I love those details. I also love how Sexton describes the Prince who sees Snow White’s “glass coffin” as being so entranced by her beauty that he “stayed so long his hair turned green / and still he would not leave.” It’s then that the dwarves give him the “glass Snow White . . . to keep in his far-off castle.” When the men drop the coffin, the “chunk of apple flew out / of her throat and she woke up miraculously.” Isn’t it perfect that, instead of a perfect, unmessy kiss fixing everything, the Prince’s devotion becomes obsession, until moss grows on him, and it’s by being accidentally dropped (not gently kissed) that Snow White returns to life? Sexton gets the absurd, beautiful, gothic humor of Snow White, and for that I love her. I think Snow White would too.