Poetry: In the thick of it.

Right now, we are in the thick of National Poetry Month. While I’m not much of a poet, I do love a good poem. And, I’ve come across some great reads in the last week that got me all fired up.

In Your Neighborhood.

Look around. There’s probably a poet near you doing an amazing project for National Poetry Month. Lisa Rivero has been on my radar; she writes how poetry “forces us to pay attention.”

Taking entries from her great-aunt Hattie’s diaries, she has been turning every-day details from life on the Great Plains in the 40’s and 50’s into beautiful poems and pairing them with images of the actual pages. I absolutely love this project.

Read two of my favorites:

• April 8, 1945: We Had a Lot Of, in the vein of William Carlos Williams’ This Is Just To Say. Lisa calls this one “Found Poetry.” I call it perfect.
• April 11, 1922: Husband Says No! an anacreontic verse poem (a word I can barely say but a poem I won’t forget).

In Your Inbox.

If you subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac, you can experience National Poetry Month every single day. I’d been on their list for a while then somehow stopped getting emails. I’m glad I signed up again, because this poem from April 13th did exactly what Lisa talks about: made me slow down and focus on the details.

Prairie Spring, by Willa Cather

Evening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
. . . .

Read it from beginning to end here. 

Your turn: favorite poem, this month or ever.