April is Poetry Month

paraphernalia’s poetry brooch
Paraphernalia’s poetry brooch		 Today is the first day of National Poetry Month in the US. Their website has a state-by-state calendar of events, they’ll email you a poem every day this month, and this year there’s a great poster with a quote from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Do I dare / Disturb the universe?
While there are lots of blogs and websites devoted to poetry, one I especially like is Poem of the Week — here’s a recent post:

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.