“Valentine for Ernest Mann” is a four-stanza, free verse poem published in 1994 as a part of Naomi Shihab Nye’s collection Red Suitcase. It was written in response to a real-life experience in which an eighth grade boy approached Nye on Valentine’s Day and asked her to mail him a poem. “Valentine for Ernest Mann” begins with a direct address to Ernest and moves into an Ars Poetica, or a meditation on what poetry is, what it can do, and how one can find it in the contemporary world. Nye adopts the casual, intimate tone of everyday speech, deftly navigating between humor and seriousness, a hallmark of her work.

“Valentine for Ernest Mann” is a mid-career poem for Nye, published after she had already won a number of awards and achieved success with other collections. In the poem, she argues that in order to live a life full of poetry and beauty, a person must actively live one’s life in a way that allows him or her to “find” poems. The epistolary nature of the poem implicitly makes the case that poetry cannot happen in a vacuum, and it is only through attention to detail, communication, and empathy with other humans that one can begin to access poetry and all of its value.

Poet Biography

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis, Missouri as the child of a Palestinian refugee father and an American mother. Her family then moved to the West Bank where they lived briefly in 1966 before returning to the United States and settling in San Antonio, Texas. Nye remained in the city and attended Trinity University, where she studied English and World Religions. She eventually earned a teaching post at Texas State University, where she teaches today.

Nye began writing at a young age and was involved in literary extracurriculars throughout her school years including editing her high school literary magazine. She released two chapbooks in the years following her college graduation: Tattooed Feet and Eye-to-Eye. Different Ways to Pray, her first full collection, came out in 1980 and established the themes that she would explore throughout her career, notably the differences, conflicts, and shared experiences between divergent cultures and religions.

Nye continued to publish regularly over the next decades, releasing award-winning poetry collections as well as essays, translations, songs, children’s books, and young adult novels. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Nye became a vocal supporter of Arab Americans, speaking out against the rising prejudice she saw in the United States while also denouncing terrorism. In an effort to open lines of communication between the two cultures, Nye published 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East in 2002, for while she became a National Book Award finalist. Further collections continued to examine the Middle East from Nye’s particular poetic lens, and continued to earn critical recognition and awards. Her poems take a generous, honest, and curious perspective, encouraging empathy in her readers.

The Poetry Foundation recently appointed Nye the Young People’s Poet Laureate, a post she will hold through 2021. Currently a Creative Writing Professor at Texas State University, Nye’s recent collections include Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), The Tiny Journalist (2019), Cast Away: Poems for our Time, and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems (2020).

Poem Text

Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Valentine for Ernest Mann.” 1994. Poets.org.

Summary

“Valentine for Ernest Mann” begins with a direct address to the subject of the poem, Ernest Mann, declaring “You can’t order a poem like you order a taco” (Line 1). Nye extends the simile, noting that Ernest should not expect to be able to request a poem and receive it in the same easy way that one might order a couple of tacos given to him “on a shiny plate” (Line 4). The speaker notes, however, that she likes Ernest’s “spirit” (Line 5), claiming that anyone who would give her his personal address and ask her to send a poem deserves something in return even if the initial request is difficult to fulfill. The speaker tells Ernest that rather than sending him the requested poem, she will tell him a secret: “poems hide” (Line 9). She gives examples of places they might be hiding: “in the bottoms of our shoes” (Line 9) or as “shadows / drifting across our ceilings” (Lines 10-11). The speaker then introduces the main argument of the poem: “What we have to do / is live in a way that lets us find them” (Lines 12-13).

In the third stanza, the speaker recounts a story of an acquaintance who gave his wife “two skunks for a valentine” (Line 15). She notes that the gift caused the man’s wife to cry, and he was confused by her tears because he thought the skunks “had such beautiful eyes” (Line 17). The speaker notes that this person “was a serious man / who lived in a serious way” (Lines 18 - 19) before relaying that he was not the kind of person to decide something is ugly “just because the world said so” (Line 20). The speaker says the man’s gifting of the skunks as a valentine was a way to “re-invent them…[to] become beautiful” (Lines 21-22). She goes on to say that with this act, “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 poem’s final stanza switches to the first person plural, suggesting that “if we re-invent whatever our lives give us / we find poems (Lines 26-27). The speaker urges Ernest, as well as the reader, to go check ordinary places for poems: a garage, a sock drawer, “the person you almost like, but not quite” (Line 28). The poem ends on the line “And let me know” (Line 29), urging Ernest and the reader to continue to engage with the speaker.