Last Day of April

At my class meeting last week, the instructor, when asked about his appearance on a Colorado Public Radio program to talk about poetry, said he really didn't like National Poetry Month. "We should celebrate poetry and the arts all year," he said.

I agree. That's the problem with delegating a month or week or day to anything. Earth DAY? We live on the earth. We should think about it every day. Ideally, poetry would be more a part of people's lives throughout the year. Part of my goal for the blog this month was to allow readers to think and write about poetry on their own terms, in the hopes that more poetry would begin to permiate their lives.

I think that all of the guest posts allowed us to do just that. We considered poetry as a place of refuge and poetry as a guilty pleasure. We saw how poetry can connect friends throughout the years or... in my lucky case... be a catalyst for a new and lasting relationship. We read original poetry, saw connections between poetry and music, and considered the source of poetic inspiration.

As you can see by the relatively small number of posts by me over the past 30 days, I could have never have celebrated National Poetry Month alone. I actually did a lot of poetry-related work this month, for my class and on my manuscript, but sadly not as much as I wanted was for the blog. So, as April turns to May, I want to extend my invitation for guest bloggers. I can think of at least three people who had hoped to write guest posts, but like me, were too busy to get to it in April. If you would like to help me in extending the spirit of National Poetry Month throughout the rest of the year, I would still love to hear from you. And I, as much as I am avoiding it, still have to finish my "History and Influences" series. In fact I think I am going to vow that part 4 of it will be this next post on this blog. And I have a lot of cute Easter pictures and a list of new Amelia words to post. So maybe that will help hurry me along.

On this last day of April, though, I will leave you with a few more poetry-related links.

This is the radio program that featured my instructor mentioned above, Chris Ransick.

And finally, one of my favorite poets, Kay Ryan, won this year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry. You can read about her life and see some of her poems here. Her poems are like tiny, dense universes. Read them twice, aloud, for wonderful surprises in sound and subject.

And until the next time, happy poetry.