17 pages • 34 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeFamous
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1995A 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
“Vocation” by William Stafford (1962)
Written by the post-war American poet Nye acknowledges as her spiritual and artistic mentor, Stafford’s poem defines the role of the poet as someone who humbly listens to the world about them. Rejecting as untenable egotism the postmodern notion that privileged the poet, Stafford’s poem, which Nye often used in her own poetry readings, recreates the moment that the poet as a boy senses that nature is trying to communicate to him a message of vitality, endurance, and optimism.
Poem 260 (“I’m Nobody”) by Emily Dickinson (1862)
Written by a poet known for seeking the sanctuary refuge of her Amherst home and preferring not to seek publication for her eccentric verse, Poem 260 can offer a comparison to Nye’s irrepressible and un-ironic sense of the poet’s mission to reach out, to delight, engage, and ultimately charge the lives of readers with optimism, courage, and joy. How dreadful, how public, Dickinson suggests, for a poet to be read, a contrast to Nye’s idea of a poet as a pulley engaged with the happy business of moving readers.
“Different Ways to Pray” by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
Appearing in the same collection as “Famous,” this poem helps understand Nye’s unflagging optimism by grounding her joy in her lifelong study of world religions. The poem examines and then discards a variety of conventional protocols for praying defined by institutional religions. In the closing stanzas, however, Nye introduces the village outcast Fowzi the Fool who so wisely believes that God can be apprehended through direct experience without the flashy rituals of church.
Further Literary Resources
“Nomad, Switchboard, Poet: Naomi Shihab Nye’s Multicultural Literature for Young Readers: An Interview” by Joy Castro (2002)
Using Nye’s career-long interest in children’s literature, the interview explores Nye’s notions of literature’s moral obligation to listen to nature and to its uplifting message of encouragement and heart. Nye comments extensively on how her tender message of community and fellowship imbues her young adult fiction and her poetry with their joy and their power.
“Naomi Shihab Nye’s Aesthetic of Smallness and the Military Sublime” by Samina Majmi (2010)
Focusing on Nye’s multicultural identity, her grounding in comparative religions, and her advocacy in the post-9/11 world to illuminate the integrity and moral vision of Arab cultures, the article explores how Nye uses different elements of religions to create a sense of transcendence over boundaries that separate those same cultures.
“Naomi Shihab Nye: A Border-Crossing Voice” by Anan Alkass Yousif (2019)
With a passing reference to the joyful definition of the poet in “Famous,” the article finds in Nye’s work, her poetry and her fiction, a gospel message of union over segregation, bridges over walls, and connection over confrontation. The article suggests Nye’s poetry in turn offers as hope the virtue of kindness and the value of empathy.
Listen to the Poem
The most helpful and illuminating interpretation of Nye’s poem is a short video, prepared in 2017, by Motionpoems under the artistic direction of Anthony Frattolillo and released in conjunction with a handsomely illustrated book-length adaptation of Nye’s poem. This presentation is fashioned liked a music video. As the poem is read, the video plays vignettes from the lives of two musicians. These vignettes highlight the poem’s argument about the human yearning to be noticed, to be part of something or someone else. The voiceover captures Nye’s open verse with pitch-perfect subtle shifts in emphasis and lingering dramatic pauses.
Related Titles
By Naomi Shihab Nye
