Category: Poetry

This is the poster for National Poetry Month. Their website has lots of resources — including a map to find out what is happening in your state and a list of 30 ways to celebrate.
I thought I’d spend the month seeing where poetry showed up in every day life. In catching up on reading my pile of Poetry Magazines, I found an article by David Orr about the anthology Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present. The book, to quote Orr, “manages to give the reader a sense of the ways in which contemporary poetry can encompass legal subjects.” So that’s not really poetry in “every day life” but in a subsequent issue, a reader responded to Orr’s article with this letter to the editor

In June 2009, Supreme Court Justice David Souter retired to his home in New Hampshire. To mark the occasion, Chief Justice John Roberts read a letter signed by the other members of the Court. “We understand your desire,” the justices said, “to trade white marble for White Mountains, and to return to your land ‘of easy wind and downy flake’ ” — quoting, of course, from (Robert Frost’s) Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening… Souter responded, “You have quoted the poet, and I will too, in words that set out the ideal of the life engaged, ‘where love and need are one.’ That phrase accounts for the finest moments of my life on this Court.”

Souter is quoting from Frost’s Two Tramps in Mud Time.

Today is the first day of National Poetry Month. I’ve been thinking about how to celebrate, as well as where I encounter poetry in my every day life. I remembered a recent book review I read about Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop that starts

Are you a hip-hop fan who can’t tell assonance from alliteration? An English major who doesn’t know Biggie from Tupac? Adam Bradley’s “Book of Rhymes” is the crash course for you. The book — essentially English 101 meets Hip-Hop Studies 101 — is an analysis of what Bradley calls “the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world”: rap, which he rightly says “is poetry, but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such.”

Song lyrics as poetry isn’t a new idea — probably originated before Shakespeare. That review reminded me how I first got interested in poetry — in high school I wrote a paper on lyrics as poetry. I don’t remember the songs, or how, in the pre-web era, I found the words. But I do remember that my Mom was curious about the songs I was considering, and we talked at some length about many of them. One in particular piqued her interest, Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles:

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

April is National Poetry Month. How are you going to celebrate? O: The Oprah Magazine suggests you update your wardrobe, in a article subtitled “Modeling the latest looks, eight rising poets express their dynamic personal styles—and show you how to cultivate your own.” I found out about this unusual way to celebrate from this article by David Orr. (I always enjoy Orr’s columns on poetry for the NY Times, you can read past ones here.) Orr starts out his column about the O Magazine article

The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine: “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets. There follows a photomontage of attractive younger women — some of whom are rising poets mostly in the “I get up in the morning” sense, but all of whom certainly look poetic — in outfits costing from $472 to $5,003. This is all part of O’s special issue celebrating National Poetry Month, edited by the noted verse aficionado Maria Shriver and including interviews with “all-star readers” like Bono, Ashton Kutcher, the gossip columnist Liz Smith and someone named James Franco, who is apparently an actor.

Read the entire column here. The photo to the left is of poet Tara Bracco, taken by Ruven Afandor.

Today is World Poetry Day, as well as the 5th anniversary of the first twitter message. Randy Kennedy has an article in the NY Times about how “poetry and literature may be flowering in the socially networked, microblogged world of the tweet.” To celebrate Poetry Day, the Times “asked four poets each to write a poem within Twitter’s text limit of 140 characters — the contributions by Billy Collins, Claudia Rankine, Elizabeth Alexander and Robert Pinsky are here. You can also share your own poems on Twitter using the hash tag #poetweet. Or just read them here.

It’s been bitterly cold here in Santa Fe this week and I’m hoping the trees I planted last summer make it through the winter. I saw the William Carlos Williams “Winter Trees” Poem Arm Chair to the left recently. And looked up the poem… Winter Trees William Carlos Williams All the complicated details of the attiring and the disattiring are completed! A liquid moon moves gently among the long branches. Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.

Stephen T. Ziliak, a professor of economics at the Roosevelt University, has a piece in the January issue of Poetry called “Haiku Economics.” He starts off:

I’m an economist. Yet poetry is my first stop on the way to invention—discovery of metaphors. No matter the audience, a model is a metaphor. Not every economist understands that. Poetry can fill the gap between reason and emotion, adding feelings to economics.

Read his entire article here.