18 pages • 36 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeThe Art of Disappearing
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
Like “The Art of Disappearing,” “Famous” prizes anonymity in a very playful way. The connotation of “fame” is that a person will be important to large crowds, but in “Famous” Shihab Nye writes about the many ways that people can be famous to individual people in small, seemingly unimportant ways. She also personifies non-human entities, saying, “The river is famous to the fish” (Line 1), and “The loud voice is famous to silence” (Line 2). She ends by saying she wants to be famous to “sticky children in grocery lines” (Line 17).
“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
This is arguably Shihab Nye’s most famous poem. Unlike in “The Art of Disappearing,” she writes here about the necessity to think about others and realize how much people have in common. As if writing directly to readers (and while seemingly experiencing solitude), she implores kindness.
“Gate A-22” by Naomi Shihab Nye (2008)
Shihab Nye uses this prose poem to tell a story about a time when she, presumably the speaker of the poem, responded to a call to help communicate with someone distressed at an airport. A woman dresses in traditional Palestinian clothing was having trouble understanding that their flight was late, not cancelled. The speaker steps up to help translate the woman’s questions for the airline attendant. Then she stays with the woman and uses their free time to make phone calls to family, friends, and poets who can speak to the women, and the woman shares homemade cookies with everyone. Shihab Nye ends with a now-famous line: “This / is the world I want to live in, the shared world.”
Further Literary Resources
Bill Moyers and Shihab Nye discuss her work, her experiences living in the Middle East, and her response to 9-11. She says that she is against war because she cares a lot about details and war wipes out details. She tells stories about the way writing and teaching poetry has helped her educate other people on the impacts of war and how she has helped readers humanize cultures they don’t understand. Moyers discusses how he found Shihab Nye’s poem “The Art of Disappearing” and carried it with him after a surgery when he needed to “disappear” from the public eye. She then reads the poem to him.
“Naomi Shihab Nye: The Poet as Performer” by The Kennedy Center (1998)
In this interview and reading, Naomi Shihab Nye reads several poems and explains her inspiration to write each one. Then she answers questions from high school students. In her poem “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” she states that to be a poet you need to live in such a way that you are able to recognize the poems when you see them. She tells stories about how she found poems or was inspired to write poems by everyday stories and pieces of language. When a student asks if she is inspired to write more by her good or bad moods, she says that as she has aged she writes no matter what her mood is, and that writing has helped her gain distance from her moods and understand her feelings better. In between questions from the audience, Shihab Nye reads “The Art of Disappearing” and discusses it. She makes it clear that she does like parties—good parties—but at the time was writing the poem to herself, giving herself the advice to take some time off, because she needed it. She says that at other times she would want to go to the party.
“Resonant Vagabond: An Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye” by Solana d’ Lámant
Shihab Nye discusses her life and beliefs as a “wandering poet.” She explains the importance of learning from and teaching others about different cultures. For example, she says that while it is true that some things are “lost” in translation, other things are “found” in translation. When a work of poems or other literature is translated it “finds” new readers who can learn from the work of others who are far away.
Listen to Poem
“The Art of Disappearing” is one of Bill Moyers’s favorite poems. In this excerpt from his interview with Shihab Nye (included above), Shihab Nye obliges his request for her to read the poem aloud.
Related Titles
By Naomi Shihab Nye
