I’m Celebrating Poetry Month (And You Can Too!)
April is Poetry Month, and 2010 marks my first celebration.
My relationship with poetry has evolved over time. When I was a child, I would take out books of poems from the library and eat–I mean, read–them whole. I would also leap from my bed on fire with rhymes and scribble verses (mostly about kings and queens, and perhaps animals, if memory serves). At some point, I entered poems in a couple of those scam contests you run across in newspaper classifieds and ended up begging my parents to purchase the mammoth, expensive, worthless anthologies that are the inevitable result of a contest where everyone wins. (In a related note, learn about flarfing here.) In high school, I wrote papers about T.S. Eliot and performed Sylvia Plath at speech competitions. In college, I memorized Pushkin in the original Russian and wrote spectacularly poor free verse.
In its newest incarnation, my poetry life includes working in fits and starts through The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry, thinking about the structure of the poetry class I would like to teach (hypothetically, if given the chance), and copying out poems longhand to decorate the walls at work. (Currently, four poems adorn my “office”: “Routine,” by Arthur Guiterman; “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay; “Musee de Beaux Arts,” by W.H. Auden; and “Politics,” by W.B. Yeats. There’s also a bit of Doris Lessing’s prose from The Golden Notebook, but that’s another post.)
For Poetry Month, I expanded. I’ve been wanting to find a path into reading more contemporary poetry, so I signed up for a month-long Poem-A-Day email from the Academy of American Poets. I also stumbled on the Seattle Times Twitter poetry contest and submitted (to date) four poems. You can read them on my Twitter page, posted April 2 and April 24, and check out the competition by clicking on #STpoem while you’re there. Finally, I started listening to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac as a podcast, since my local public radio station doesn’t play it. To be honest, I’d been downloading it for a while…but Poetry Month gave me the push I needed to press play.
With only one fleeting week left to celebrate, I’m on the prowl for a few more ways to insert poetry in my life–not just in April, but every month. There are some strong contenders. Poetry Speaks is one, a website where you can listen to poems and even download poetry ala iTunes for a small fee. I’m also considering convincing my parents to become “vectors” for Broadsided, as North Dakota is one of the few states that hasn’t yet experienced guerilla-style public poetry sharing. If anyone has any other suggestions, please comment!
And may the poets be with you.
I read your poems on twitter, I like them! Are you thinking of publishing?
You know, we probably have enough Bengfort Family poetry from Bethany-Devi day, and the wedding, and twitter, etc. that we could put together an anthology! In fact, if you want to send me word copies- I could probably do the design work into PDF and get it bound by Lulu. Thoughts?
Anyone remember the Moloch poem? That’s got to be saved somewhere, right?
Keep up with the poems on Twitter, you’re quite good at them! At first I thought you were quoting famous poets!
Here is a poem in honor of your poems:
Jaci; a poet,
A modern delivery:
She rhymes on Twitter.
Where the heck did that photo of me come from???
Wicked Haiku! Oh… Jaci already figured that out. I thought I was smart.
Chris–nice haiku!
Devi–I’m hoping one or two might make Seattle Times, but I have to wait until the end of the month to find out.
Ben–did you tell people to comment? I’m suspicious…
Awww… what a cute photo, Chris! Do you have a Gravatar or did I upoad that on my last user purge?
Well, now that you’re beardy and catless, this comment makes no sense.
Heh, lol.
Well, I just came up with my replacement for the Poem-A-Day email when the month ends–I’ll now be receiving the Writer’s Almanac as a text email to my work inbox daily! If you’re interested, you can sign up to receive it too (text or html format) at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/. And Ben, I think you might be interested in this one: http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/.
Today is National Poem in Your Pocket Day! I got an early start by handing out ten different poems, copied out in longhand last night one to a page on legal paper and given to coworkers between the hours of 2AM and 7AM.
We read-in Silence-
Awed but comment little