Whether it’s for an upcoming holiday or a birthday, here are 7 gift ideas for celebrating the main poet in your life—from the unique to the necessary—that they will love.
Empower Tools
Let them know their poetry is better than that cheap plastic stapler they’ve had since high school. Help them update an essential tool of the poet with a durable metal stapler. Nothing says Your poetry doesn’t suck like a red Swingline.
Give Them the Moon
Thousands of years before the poet in your midst was a twinkle, the ancient greek poet Sappho tilted her white-washed face up to the moon and waited for that next perfect word to come to her. Unfortunately many of her words were lost, leaving us only fragments of her work to drool over. In this same vein, give your poet a fragment of the moon. Buy them one-acre, five-acres, or up to 100-acres of the land that has inspired so many words and emotions since the beginning. http://www.lunarland.com/moon-land.
Indulge Their Vice
Just like any job, writing poetry is work. Help them blow off some mental exhaust by satisfying their vice, whatever it/they may be. You could try a stocking full of scratch-offs, a DQ ice cream cake, or a monthly coffee subscription. Bean Box will send your poet a 12-ounce bag of freshly roasted coffee beans from the independent small-batch roasters of Seattle, a place world famous for its coffee and literary scene. A happy worker is a productive worker.
Give Them Balls
Keep your poet’s writing hand strong and mind sharp with Baoding Balls, the original fidget spinner. You probably already know what these are as they go by a number of other names, such as Chinese Meditation Balls and Chinese Stress Balls, but do you know their exact purpose? These balls first appeared in China during the Ming Dynasty and were constructed with iron. Today, they are made of other materials besides iron, but the same concept still applies, and that is the idea of balancing internal life energies by way of the Yin and Yang philosophy. This is achieved by rotating the Baoding balls around each other in your palm, first clockwise and then counterclockwise. As a bonus to balancing your innards, it couples as a good exercise for your hand, strengthening your mechanical writing muscles.
Make Them Glow
Flatter your poet by framing their most revered personal work, or if you can’t get ahold of a copy without raising suspicion, frame a poem from any poet that you know has inspired them. This extra layer of thought will be apparent to your dear poet, as you, the gift-giver, must make detailed decisions about the right poem, paper, color, font, frame, etc. The extra time spent on this gift might just get you written into their next poem.
Give Them a Nostalgic Thrill
An easy gift for a poet is always a journal, but, let’s be honest, it’s boring. Change that notion with a locking journal to make writing feel criminal again. Go with a combination lock to keep street-sophisticated moms, and others, from picking the lock with ease, thereby giving the author’s thoughts peace of privacy until they’re ready to go public in a poem.
Introduce Them
Further cement the connection to their big literary family by giving your poet a subscription to a literary journal. Do you know if they’ve submitted their work to any journals? If so, that might be a good one to subscribe them to. If not, try to pick a journal that you feel represents their own aesthetic. This gift option doubles your impact of giving by providing your poet with the gift of a year-long subscription while also providing the journal with financial support to continue operating—a give and take that will keep both writer and publisher going strong into the future.
Meet the blogger:
J.R. SELMI is a poet in her final year at Hamline University. She was raised in an all-women, tri-generational household and added a fourth with her daughter, which, to say the least, gives her a unique perspective.
