Established by the Academy of
American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month begins on April 1st and runs
through April 30th. This
month-long celebration of poetry is held annually “to widen the attention of individuals
and the media to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic
heritage, and to poetry books and journals of wide aesthetic range and
concern.” During April, poets, poetry lovers, publishers, booksellers, literary
organizations, libraries, and schools throughout the US celebrate poetry.
One of the challenges of NPM is
to read and/or write a poem every day. Over the years since I started this
blog, every National Poetry Month I’ve included various example poems,
inspiration words and phrases, and selected lines from well-known poems to
serve as “mentors” for interested blog readers. Sometimes, getting the right “jumpstart”
can be challenging, and a good example can advise and guide both imagination
and sensibility, take some of the risk out of getting started, and encourage
poets to take risks in their own work.
This year for National Poetry
Month, you’ll find thirty quotes (one for each day in April) about poetry by well-known thinkers and poets,
ancient to modern. I’ve “collected” quotes about poetry for a long time, and it’s
wonderful to share some of them with you here on the blog.
My idea is for you to read a
quote each day, think about it, possibly locate and read a poem by the poet, and then write
a poem of your own that’s inspired by either the quote or by the poem. Alternatively (and this could be fun), you might try writing your own quote about poetry. This is a
little different from other years, and I hope you enjoy the process.
As always, your
sharing is welcome,
so please be post
your thoughts and poems as comments!
Regular weekly
prompts will resume in May.
In the meantime, I
wish you a wonderful and poetry-filled April!
Happy National Poetry
Month!
Tips:
1. Let your reactions to the
quotes surprise you. Begin with no expectations, and let your poems take you
where they want to go.
2. Give the quotes your own spin,
twist and turn them, let the phrases trigger personal responses: pin down your
ghosts, identify your frailties, build bridges and cross rivers, take chances!
3. Keep in mind that writing a
poem a day doesn’t mean you have to “finish” each poem immediately. You can
write a draft each day and set your drafts aside to work on later.
4. Whatever you do this month,
find some time (a little or a lot) to enjoy some poetry!
Let the poeming
begin!
April 1: Poetry is finer and more philosophical than
history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the
particular. —Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)
April 2: Poetry comes nearer to
vital truth than history. —Plato (BC 427-BC 347)
April 3: Poetry is the journal of
a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky. —Carl
Sandburg (1878-1967)
April 4: If I feel physically as
if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. —Emily
Dickinson (1830-1886)
April 5: Poetry is not a turning
loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have
personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.
—T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
April 6: Poetry is not an
expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking
what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet
does. —Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
April 7: Poetry is the universal
language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt
for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. —William
Hazlitt (1778-1830)
April 8: Poetry is the
achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. —Carl
Sandburg (1878-1967)
April 9: It is a sad fact about
our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his
art than he can by practicing it. —W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
April 10: Any healthy man [woman]
can go without food for two days—but not without poetry. —Charles
Baudelaire (1821-1867)
April 11: A poem begins in
delight and ends in wisdom. —Robert Frost (1875-1963)
April 12: Poetry lifts the veil
from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
were not familiar. —Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792- 1822)
April 13: Out of our quarrels
with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make
poetry. —William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939)
April 14: My poetry, I should
think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me. —Countee
Cullen (1903-1946)
April 15: Poetry is an echo,
asking a shadow to dance. —Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
April 16: There is not a particle
of life which does not bear poetry within it. —Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
April 17: Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought
and the thought has found words. —Robert Frost (1875-1963)
April 18: Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by
singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest
thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” — John Keats (1795-1821)
April 19: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. —William
Wordsworth (1770-1850)
April 20: Genuine poetry can communicate before it is
understood. —T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
April 21: Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life
is burning well, poetry is just the ash. —Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)
April 22: Poetry is life distilled. —Gwendolyn Brooks
(1917-2000)
April 23: I define poetry as celebration and confrontation.
When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That’s an
on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there’s a kind of
daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it’s not
what we know, it’s what we can risk discovering. —Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- )
April 24: Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s
an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. —Mary
Oliver (1935- )
April 25: If poetry and the arts do anything, they can
fortify your inner life, your inwardness. —Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
April 26: I’m a great believer in poetry out of the
classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d
rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA
program. —Billy Collins (1941- )
April 27: Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of
everyone. —Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- )
April 28: I think that were beginning to remember that the
first poets didn’t come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody
walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder
and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem. —Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)
April 29: Poetry is language at its most distilled and most
powerful. —Rita Dove (1952-)
April 30: Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. —James
Tate (1943-2015)
