Monday, April 2, 2012

Eating Poetry This Month



Happy National Poetry Month! Not only are flowers revealing themselves and trees beginning to bid with new life, but poetry is blooming too! I hope you'll be eating poetry with me this month as well.

A few ideas for celebrating:

The Found Poetry Review started The Found Poetry Project and made poetry kits for distribution this month. You can either try to find some in your city or you can make your own and get them out into your community! Five of them are going out in El Paso!

Robert Lee Brewer's Poem-A-Day challenge kicked off yesterday. I participated in this last year and found his writing prompts really helped to get the creativity flowing. My advice: Just write, write, write. Use May to go back and revise. Just get the thoughts down on paper (or into the computer)!

Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo site with daily prompts is another great challenge as well. I am still trying to decide between the two and don't want to overwhelm myself with both. A friend of mine made a good suggestion: choose one prompt a day from either challenge and write all the prompts down for later.


There are also lots of people holding contests on their blogs for poetry book giveaways this month. Jessie Carty is one you should definitely check out. I've read two of her chapbooks now and really enjoy her work.

It's never too late to give away a book yourself either!

I'm going to do a poetry pairing each Thursday on the blog for April. Stay tuned. I'm excited.

Enjoy April! Andrea

P.S. If you have any other ideas for National Poetry Month, please share with us!





10 comments:

  1. His voice sends me right into the setting, albeit in my mind. Loved the 'eye candy' in the ad :)

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  2. What a beautiful month to celebrate the verse of poets ... Happy Poetry Month to you :)

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  3. Happy happy poetry month! Delightful to see all these words floating around.

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  4. Happy Poetry Month to you, Andrea! Over at Every Day Poets (http://www.everydaypoets.com/), where I'm an editor, there will be a contest announcement in mid-April. Anyone who is interested in Japanese short form poetry might want to check that out as part of their celebration of poetry this month.
    Love the Mark Strand piece.

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  5. Thanks for the information, Kathleen! I will be sure to share it. Happy Poetry Month to you too. :)

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  6. When my kids were younger I used to volunteer to read poetry in their classrooms, and tried to read it to them at home. I really think we need to expose kids early to poetry, otherwise they grow up thinking it's another boring and useless part of their English class. I'm so happy all my kids enjoy poetry in one form or another.

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