April is National Poetry Month.
If you've been reading my blog, you know that I'm on a three-month roll with commemorating months. February - Black History, March - Women's History, April - Poetry . In keeping with the spirit of NPM, my goal is to write one poem, prose poem, or flash poem for each day of the month of April. To keep myself on track, and honest, I'll post each piece here. Feel welcome to comment or join me by writing one per day, also.
Or;
Sign up to recieve a poem a day.
Suscribe to poet.org and Celebrate Poetry Year-Round.
Here's a great article about how National Poetry Month began, (includes lots of links!)
National Poetry Month: A Brief History
Bob Holman & Margery Snyder from About.com Guide
The First National Poetry Month
Modeling the success of Black History Month (February) and Women’s History Month (March), the Academy of American Poets initiated the first National Poetry Month in April 1996, enlisting the Poet Laureate and the Library of Congress, as well as poetry reading hosts, teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishers and other literary groups across the country to organize events celebrating poetry in American life throughout the month.
Poetry’s place at the center of American history and culture was most eloquently celebrated in the letter President Bill Clinton sent from the White House to mark the beginning of that first National Poetry Month:
“Throughout our history, America has been blessed by the powerful voices of our poets. Dedicated artists, innovators, and stewards of our language, they tell us not only who we are, but also who we can become. They distill our emotions, clarify our thoughts, and renew our spirits with the vigor of their words and the freshness of their perspective.... In this age of profound change and exciting possibility, we need our artists more than ever to imagine the best future for us and remind us of what is good and constant in our past.”
(You can see a facsimile of the original letter at the Academy of American Poets Web site, at the bottom of their page of city proclamations supporting National Poetry Month.)
National Poetry Month Activities
The marquee event of National Poetry Month is a high-profile reading series, which began with the April 1996 reading at the Library of Congress hosted by then-Poet Laureate Robert Hass and including Rita Dove, Anthony Hecht, Mark Strand, Carolyn Forché, Linda Pastan and Charles Wright. This has evolved into an annual benefit gala called Poetry & the Creative Mind, which gathers movie stars, writers and public figures to read poems, celebrate contemporary poetry and raise money for AAP and its National Poetry Month events.
Each National Poetry Month since 1996 has also seen an ever-growing upsurge of performance poetry events in towns all around the U.S., poetry teaching projects in schools, library book circles turning to poems for the month of April, newspaper articles about “the current poetry renaissance,” poetry publishers’ schedules rearranged to focus on April publication dates, poem-a-day emailings, and writing group challenges to write a poem every day during the month. AAP publishes an online calendar listing poetry events around the country, and invites poetry organizers to participate in the National Poetry Month festivities by adding their April events to the calendar. Each year, AAP also makes a National Poetry Month poster for distribution to schools, libraries and bookstores to promote “poetry awareness.”
Special Projects Created for National Poetry Month In addition to the readings and the promotional poster, each April has brought one or more special National Poetry Month projects aimed at making poetry more visible in American public life.
1998 — “The Great APLseed Giveaway”
Andrew Carroll, cofounder of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, edited 101 Great American Poems and then spent National Poetry Month 1998 driving across the country in a rented truck, giving away 100,000 donated copies of the anthology along the way.
1999 — “Catch the Poetry Bug”
The American Poetry & Literacy Project got Volkswagen to place a copy of Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel & Adventure in each new VW delivered in April 1999, and the “Catch the Poetry Bug” campaign sent a trio of magnetic-poetry-encrusted VW Beetles to schools, libraries and parks across the country.
2001 — “The American Poet Stamp Project”
The Academy of American Poets asked people to vote on their Web site for the poet whose face they would most like to see on a postage stamp. Langston Hughes won the poll by a large margin, and the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp honoring him the next year, just in time for his centennial celebration.
2002 — “The Poetry Daily Collaborative Poem”
In 2002, Albert Goldbarth permitted his poem “Library” to be posted at Poetry Daily as the seed of a collaborative poem for National Poetry Month. Invited poets added lines in March and in April it was opened up to any willing contributors.
2003 — “The National Poetry Map”
The Academy of American Poets created a comprehensive state-by-state directory of poets, literary organizations, festivals, lit journals and small presses, writing programs, poetry-friendly bookstores and local events culled from its national calendar. The National Poetry Map is more than a one-time celebration—it’s a growing resource of information about local poetry doings in every American state.
2004 — “The National Poetry Almanac”For NatPoMo 2004, AAP launched a year-long series of essays on poets, poems, poetry books, poetic forms and poetic interaction with the other arts, organized in monthly themes. Now the almanac is complete online—worth bookmarking to read each daily entry.
2005 — “The Poetry Book Club”AAP’s project for NatPoMo 2005 was a comprehensive set of resources intended to seed poetry book clubs across the country: suggested formats, book lists and reading guides for the classics.
2006 — “Poetry Read-a-Thon” and “Life Lines”
National Poetry Month 2006 saw the inauguration of the nationwide Poetry Read-a-Thon sponsored by AAP in classrooms all across the U.S., in which students logged their reading of classic poems and teachers gathered their written responses to the poems. In its own variation on the Favorite Poem Project, AAP also gathered poets’ and readers’ choices of the lines of poetry they keep close to them at important times in their lives for its Life Lines collection.
2008 — “Poem in Your Pocket Day”New York City has hosted Poem in Your Pocket Day every April since 2002, and in 2008 AAP made it a national celebration, offering pocket-sized PDFs of poems to print out and take with you on the day, as well as an archive of poems for mobile phones.
2009 — “Free Verse Photo Project”
AAP used its 2009 National Poetry Month project to celebrate the liberation of poems from the printed page, gathering photographs of ephemeral poems written in almost any medium other than paper and ink—seeds arranged on a concrete sidewalk, sugar spilled on a table, icing on a cake....
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