Burning the Old Year

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American modern poet currently serving as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate (2019-2021). Aside from writing adult and children’s poetry, she is also an editor, essayist, and young adult novelist. Nye works to bring poetry to underserved communities, and bridge communities and cultures nationwide with poetry and literature. Her poem “Burning the Old Year,” was published in 1995 in her collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

“Burning the Old Year” is a free verse poem exploring the themes of absence, time, and the temporary versus the permanent. In the poem, Nye displays the impermanence of the inconsequential aspects of any year, explaining that humanity carries so few permanent pieces of life with them as time passes. “Burning the Old Year” is Nye’s honest look into what is gone and remembered as she enters into a new year.

Poet Biography

Naomi Shihan Nye was born in 1952 to a Palestinian father and American mother. She lived in Saint Louis, MO, until she was 14 when she moved to Jerusalem, Palestine, and later moved to San Antonio, TX. In San Antonio she attended Trinity University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and world religions.

Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet” (d’ Lámant, Solana. “Resonant Vagabond: An Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye.” Reunion: The Dallas Review, UT Dallas, 2006, ah.utdallas.edu/reunion/nye/). She has travelled around the United States as well as to Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the Middle East. Her experiences at home, her heritage, and her travels inspired her to create accessible, diverse poetry connecting various cultures and allowing her readers to see the communal aspects of humanity.

Nye has authored and edited over 30 volumes of work. Her poetry for adults and children includes Yellow Glove (1986), Words Under the Words (1995), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), You & Yours: Poems (2005), Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018), and Cast Away: Poems for our time (2020). Her young adult novels include Habibi (1999), Going, Going (2005), and The Turtle of Oman (2014). Nye has also written essays and short stories and edited various anthologies.

Nye has won many awards and fellowships including four Pushcart Prizes, two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Golden Rose Award, the Robert Creeley Prize, the Betty Prize, the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award, the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement; she has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. She is the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2019-2021.

Nye is a professor of creative writing–poetry at Texas State University.

Poem Text

Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Burning the Old Year.” 1995. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In “Burning the Old Year,” the speaker describes the burning of remnants of notes, papers, and letters of the past year as she enters the new. She describes how the burning of these remnants “sizzle like moth wings” (Line 4), turn into smoke, and join with the air. The speaker explains how “so much of any year is flammable” (Line 6), listing inconsequential papers being burned and how the days past resemble a “swirling flame” (Line 8). She asserts so little of any year is a “stone” (Line 9). The speaker says the absence of what is lost “shouts, celebrates, leaves a space” (Line 11), and how going into the next year she is left with “the smallest numbers” (Line 12). The poem ends with the speaker reflecting on how the things she did not do during the past year are all that is left after what is burned is gone.