Good morning, poetry lovers everywhere, on this early April day that actually, right after the dismal March that we in New England call “mud season,” feels like spring, with temperature in the near-balmy forties. While April isn’t really laughing her “girlish laughter,” neither is she yet weeping “girlish tears.”
This is also National Poetry Month, which we have celebrated for so long and with such verve that it’s hard to believe it was first introduced as recently as 1966 and has since become the largest literary festival in the world. Teachers in schools everywhere are introducing children to and helping them to experience poetry.
I had intended to make today’s column an exhortation – a call to you to be vigilant in service to poetry. Go to senior centers, assisted-living facilities, “over-55” residences. See that poetry isn’t relegated to a dim corner, and donate if you can. Go to your few-and-far-between independent bookstores, as well as the chains, and check out their collections. Look over the course catalogs that arrive in the mail. As you buy a poet’s collected works, donate the individual volumes to places where the collections are thin. Publicize what you’re doing and get people out to poetry events in your area –readings, book launches, and the like – and if there are none, organize some. Arts funding is drying up; fight it. Become a missionary on behalf of poetry. Buy the theme-based anthologies that support your causes, e.g., Poets in the Age of Trump. Did I imagine this title? Perhaps. And here’s an important question: How Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: April 2, 2018
