Poetry world

National Poetry Month is the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, bloggers, and, of course, poets marking poetry�s important place in our culture and our lives every April.

The Academy of American Poets established National Poetry Month in 1996. Along the way we enlisted a variety of government agencies and officials, educational leaders, publishers, sponsors, poets, and arts organizations to help. National Poetry Month is a registered trademark of the Academy of American Poets.

In coordination with poets, booksellers, librarians, and teachers, April was chosen was chosen as the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry.

Here are 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month

Many classrooms participated in this year�s Dear Poet Project during National Poetry Month writing letters to poets. The Academy of American Poets received over 1,300 letters!

Take a look at the correspondences between students and poets who serve on the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors: https://www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/dear-poet-letters-2016

• Post pocket-sized verses in public places. Use the aptly named poem, �Keep a Pocket in Your Poem�.
• Memorize a poem. and speaking poetry
• Post lines from your favorite poem on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tumblr. You might want to turn your original poetry into digital form using something like Animoto.
• Send a poem to a friend.

Bill Murray supports New York's Poets House and has been known to hang around with Billy Collins and others and read or post poems. In celebration of National Poetry Month, Oprah Magazine asked him if he would be interested in picking some poems for the magazine to print and to comment on them. He was and he did.


Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Thomas Lux and Naomi Shihab Nye are among the poets that Murray chose to include in the issue.

Some of his comments:

On Kinnell's "Oatmeal," about the poet sharing a meal with the late John Keats: "Alas, Kinnell, too, is now available for breakfast." (Kinnell passed away in 2014.)

Lux's odd romantic ode "I Love You Sweatheart" starts out:

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway.

The poem got this note: "This poem vibrates the insides of my ribs, where the meat is most tender."

Nye's poem "Famous" says:

I want to be famous in the way
a pulley is famous
or a buttonhole, not because it did
anything spectacular
but because it never forgot
what it could do.

Murray comments on it: "It's not the dream of being big. It's the dream of being real. That's what stands out to me."

www.nme.com/news/

April is National Poetry Month. Since 1996, we have a put more emphasis on things poetic for that month and it has become the largest literary celebration in the world. This year is the 20th anniversary celebration of poets and poetry.

I have been getting a copy of the official National Poetry Month poster and collecting them since the beginning. For 2016, artist Debbie Millman created one which features lines of poetry by some of our greatest poets. 

The Academy of American Poets distributes over 120,000 posters to classrooms, libraries, and bookstores throughout the United States and you can get one for free, while supplies last.


https://www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/
https://www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/form/poster-request-form