April is National Poetry Month

 

As one can tell from my tag cloud,¹ I don't write about much about poetry.  While I do enjoy and appreciate the occasional poem, I generally find poetry less accessible (to me personally) than prose. But, April is National Poetry Month (gorgeous poster,² no?) and I've been thinking about poetry quite a bit lately (thanks to Ally Condie's Matched trilogy),³ so the time is ripe.

I'll share a poem tomorrow and at least one other every week for the rest of the month. And, maybe this focus will encourage me to read more poetry going forward.  We shall see.

1. Before this post, only 7 were tagged "poetry." Of course there may be more poetry references than I've actually tagged, but it's still quite a small percentage.
2. Designed by Chin-Yee Lai for the Academy of American Poets' National Poetry Month and featuring lines from "Our Valley" by Philip Levine.
3. The Society, the group that governs the repressive future society depicted in the series, decided to "eliminate distractions such as excess poetry and music while retaining an optimal amount to enhance culture and satiate the desire for experiencing art" (Crossed, 107). Committees were formed, one for each area of the arts, and directed to choose the one hundred examples of each art that would be saved. The series takes place decades after this selection (the teenage protagonist's grandmother was a member of the Hundred Poems committee) and two of the discarded (banned) poems are integral to the plots of Matched and Crossed, Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" and Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" respectively.