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April is National Poetry Month
You may not have realized it. It's not as high-profile as Sexual Assault Awareness Month (which April has also been designated), and both of those are much less known than other months, like Black History Month (February) and Women's History Month (March). But I've chosen to celebrate it by having poems sent to my e-mail daily, from poets.org.
Sadly, I've been less than impressed with the poems they've been offering me. Some have been decent, others were just forgettable. So instead, I've been seeking out poems on my own. I had a mini-argument over facebook about this poem, a sestina called "Six Words." I think it's brilliant; a friend of mine thinks it's terrible. Part of the enjoyment of this poem is knowing what the hell a sestina is, though. They're difficult to explain, but let me just say that they're really complicated.
When I was in high school, my English teacher junior and senior years started this thing called "March Madness of Poetry," where we all chose two poems, she made brackets, and then two poems would face off and the class would vote on their favorite. This would inevitably take longer than the month of March, so it was always very convenient that March Madness was followed by National Poetry Month. I never won, but my most successful poem was e e cummings' "somewhere i have never travelled " which remains one of my favorite poems still. Probably my second favorite poem, after that one, I encountered in my creative writing class in college. Usually analyzing a piece of writing makes some people hate it, but I'm the opposite. I wrote a response paper on Sharon Olds' "I Go back to May 1937" and fell in love with it. The imagery! The sword-tipped fence! The plates of blood! Reading it now, a year later, still makes me go into paroxysms of joy at the words.
Though I can't write poetry at all, I do enjoy reading it. I'd love to hear about your favorite poems. But for now, I'll leave you with the winner of the first March Madness of my English class:
of cicadas suggests that
they are about to die.
Jane: I LOVE poetry and didn't realize it was National Poetry Month.
Actually I didn't even know there was such a "month." Gosh, I could go on
for pages and pages about favorite poems but here's one that immediately
comes to mind:
Dana Gioia, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, promotes poetry
reading as much as he can. He encouraged everyone to memorize a poem, and
the one he chose as a good example was "Jenny Kissed Me" by Leigh Hunt.
I've loved that poem since I was about 13, and I think it is incredibly
evocative. I could even imagine it as the basis for a romance.