Poetry today and all month long
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Since 1996, the Academy of American Poets has celebrated April as National Poetry Month. There is a new poster every year, and loads of stuff geared for teachers and schools. What’s a poor grown-up to do?
Well, there’s the daily poem. Sign up at Poets.org to have a poem e-mailed to you every morning during the month of April, all from books newly published this year. Today’s is by Philip Levine, whose collection ‘What Work Is’ won the L.A. Times book prize for poetry in 1991. His new poem, titled ‘A Story,’ begins:
Everyone loves a story. Let’s begin with a house.We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the roomswith things — tables, chairs, cupboards, drawersclosed to hide tiny beds where children once sleptor big drawers that yawn open to revealprecisely folded garments washed half to death,unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out.
The complete poem is online; all the month’s poems will be archived at Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets also has an official gala/reading in New York, a cool poetry mapping project and -- because this is 2010 -- an iPhone app.
And there will be more poetry to come this month. If you’ve got something poetry going, e-mail me about it at carolyn.kellogg@latimes.com.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
