April once again brings us National Poetry Month, our yearly attempt to promote the genre to the masses or as poet Charles Bernstein frames it “promoting poetry as if it were an “easy listening”.
There are events going on everywhere for everyone so contact your local library or bookstore to see what’s going on in your community or check the Poetry Near You page at Poets.org
A highlight is the 15th Annual Poets House Showcase in New York. Each April Poets House puts on a show. Every poetry book published in the U.S. the previous year goes on display for the month. That’s right-every one of them.
This year features over 2,000 books, CD’s and DVD’s from more than 500 independent, university and commercial presses.
The Poets House archives each showcase in its database, The Directory of American Poetry Books. It’s free, fully-searchable and contains over 20,000 poetry titles published between 1990 and 2006. It is the most comprehensive bibliographic resource available for poetry published during that time. If you read, write or think poetry this is an essential reference.
Here are 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month
Internet archive feature: Feeling With Their Nerves: Young Poets on the Archive
NPR and National Poetry Month
Click on the image above to see this years National Poetry Month poster up close. A typographic portrait of Walt Whitman created by illustrator and graphic designer Christoph Niemann.
Also don’t miss Charles Bernstein’s 1999 essay “Against National Poetry Month as Such” where he responds to” promoting poetry as if it were an “easy listening” and proposes an alternative called International Anti-Poetry month”.