April Is National Poetry Month!

Poetry may be the oldest form of literature. Certainly some of the oldest recorded works that still survive are poems. Poetry has the power to express all human emotions, and every culture has its own unique poetic forms.

So how can you celebrate National Poetry Month? Check out this Scholastic page, with webcasts by poets, an interactive poetry-making machine, and a chance to submit your original poetry to Scholastic for publication! Poetry 180, a project of the Library of Congress, provides a list of 180 excellent poems, one for every day of the school year. You can sign up for the RSS feed, and have one delivered to you daily. For poetry written by teens, try TeenInk.com, where you can also submit your own work.

I'll sign off with Ron Koertge's "Do You Have Any Advice for Those of Us Just Starting Out?":

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.


(from "Fever," 2006
Red Hen Press)