It’s National Poetry Month: Ways and Reasons to Join the Festivities

It’s National Poetry Month: Ways and Reasons to Join the Festivities
“Poetry, from the Stanza della Segnatura,” 1509–1511, by Raphael. Public Domain
Jeff Minick
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April has arrived, that season when in many places the growl of a lawnmower replaces the roar of a snow blower. It’s the first full month of spring, when melted ice and snow perform their usual magic, giving birth to daffodils and grass as green as the hills of Ireland. Sunlight falls soft as down on the uplifted face, and as Lord Tennyson tells us, “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

Meanwhile, the Academy of American Poets is hoping that April will turn our thoughts to poetry. Once again, the academy has launched National Poetry Month, dispatching posters, books, and creative ideas for reading and composing verse to schools across the country. Many libraries will put up displays of the likes of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Mary Oliver, and some bookstores will hold special readings featuring poetry as old as the ancient Greeks and as new as a sonnet written yesterday by a high school sophomore.
Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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