Poetry on the Porch

My family and I love August in New York. Parking is easy, and we even get a seat on the subways. But the first week of August every summer, we, too, flee the sirens and horns, abandoning the cacophonous clatter of City Lore's First Street and First Avenue offices for a week at the beach in Garden City, South Carolina. My wife and fellow folklorist Amanda Dargan's parents rent the house, and all of her sisters and our nieces and nephews pile in, spending afternoons and evenings on the screened-in porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and sea. Among our traditions is an evening spent reading poems on the porch, a tradition Lucas Dargan, Amanda's dad, eagerly anticipates, with his at-the-ready 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But we all bring a few poems down to the beach to read, and Aidan Powers, now 10 years old, comes equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poems from books like Falling Up. (One of the Silverstein lines delivered on poetry night has even become a kind of family expression: "We can be friends forever," I joke with Aidan. "There's really nothing to it. I tell you what to do, and you do it!") Masterpieces and ditties are read side by side. Poems from the English Romantics like Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Byron are read side by side with cowboy poetry and nonsense verses. One family story reminded Lucas of an old limerick that he mostly recalled: "A wonderful bird is the pelican / His bill holds more than his belly can...." Then Lucas forgot a line, which we were able to recapture thanks to the internet, available even at the beach in recent years. "Ah, that's it! 'He can take in his beak / Food enough for a week / But I'm damned if I see how the helican.'" But the poems that waft onto the sea air that evening carry with them not only the finely wrought words of their creators, but the family stories and personalities and ethos of the family gathering. Each year, for instance, Amanda's sister Sarah reads "The Minuet" by Mary Mapes Dodge in honor of her mother: "Grandma told me all about it / Told me so I couldn't doubt it / How she danced / my Grandma danced / Long ago." She reads that poem every year, because it reminds us all of a story that: Frances, now 94, loves to tell of how she once jumped up on a table at the Junior Senior ball and danced to Cab Calloway's 1931 hit "Minnie the Moocher." We could have guessed what poem would come next. Lucas, a forester and environmentalist, never misses a chance to read Shelley's "The (Cloud": "I am the daughter of Earth and Water, / And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores; / I change, but I cannot die . …