Poetry

The way I see it, poetry is a method of applying beauty to the mundane.  It elevates the ordinary.  While I am most certainly not a poet (my version of creating beauty around the ordinary involves the formatting of complicated data into easily understood spreadsheets and databases), but many Piatts over the years have written poetry.  I was reminded of this when, last weekend, a family of Piatt descendants visited the Castles.  While touring the homes with her parents, twelve-year-old Zoe was inspired to write the following poems:

Exhibit Panel, Mac-A-Cheek
My vernon of poetry

Two Minutes of Tinkering

1.     

  

I wish I’d known her,

You can tell,

She and I would’ve gotten

Along quite well.

I love to write and she did too

Oh Sarah, why couldn’t I have known you?

2.       

The Piatts, at least they seemed

Like nice folks, plain as can be

And though they now they are dead,

And they are in my family tree,

Their blood still runs in me.

I, Zoe, will carry on,

Writing books, pomes and songs

And all the time I’m doing so

Sarah’s sprit in me shall not go.

The "her" to whom Zoe is referring is Sarah Piatt, the most prolific of the Piatt poets.  I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I'm not actually sure I'v read any of her poetry.  I need to take care of that.  However, Zoe's poems bring up the fascinating issue of continuation.  

When I look back at the four generations before me who gave tours at Mac-A-Cheek and the six generations before me who lived on the land that my family still calls home it is hard not be taken with the ways in which the work of one generation is continued on and how the values and ideologies that informed one generation still inform my mother and I.  

The dissemination of information has been important to Piatts for generations.  This took many forms, but always comes down to the love of sharing knowledge and ideas that is prevalent in every generation of Piatts.  Abram Piatt wrote and published a newspaper called the Mac-A-Cheek Press.  William McCoy displayed his collection of curiosities to the public.  Sarah Piatt and many other wrote poems and plays.  Donn Piatt was a prolific writer in many genres.  My grandfather, William, was well known for his "gift of gab" and his thrill at telling stories to anyone who would listed.  As I sit at my end of this long line of information spreaders, the last line of Zoe's second poem rings particularly true.  It's not just Sarah's spirit that lives in me, but the collective spirits of all who have come before me and who's work I continue as I use the technology of my time and the particular skills available to me to elevate and disseminate various forms of information through spread shed analysis, exhibit design, and of course this blog.  

What does your family value?  How do you embody and apply those values?  I think it's fascinating to look at the ways in which our activities change as the decades go by but the inspiration for and the function of the activities continues.