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.
Inspired by the successful celebrations of Black History Month (February) and Women's History Month (March), the Academy of American Poets established National Poetry Month in 1996. Along the way the organization 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, the Academy of American Poets chose a month when poetry could be celebrated with the highest level of participation. April seemed the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry, in an ultimate effort to encourage poetry readership year-round. Continue reading from The Academy of American Poets
Poetry is intensely valuable to me and it always has been. It is my antidote to despair, tiredness and loneliness; a thread that runs through my life. I solve problems with its lines—not just their lexicon, but the life breathed into form by rhythm, rhyme or meter: a riddle; a moment of joy. It is my borrowed voice.
A favourite is Louis MacNeice's 'Meeting Point', which I have always thought was a magisterial coming together of the ordinary and the the extraordinary; of quotidian rhythm and something magical. When I read this poem, I am caught up by its concept of the loved ones part of, yet isolated in happiness from the world; they are separate while they participate in daily activity. Something absorbing, supernatural and cosmic happens in the poem. And it is transporting.
