Category: April 2019

Happy National Poetry Month 2019!

Hello Friends!

Each April, I celebrate National Poetry Month by sharing with you all some of what I love about poetry — through 30 poems from 30 poets delivered to your inboxes over 30 days.

Email open rates for the past twelve(!) Aprils tell me that more people read this April 1 message than any other message I’ll send out all month (alas, no matter how good my subject lines are) — so if you’re going to read only one poem this month, let’s make it a love poem:



Haiku [for you]

love between us is
speech and breath. loving you is
a long river running.

■




Sonia Sanchez’s “Haiku [for you]” from her 1998 collection Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums is somewhat unusual in that haiku is a poetic form that is not typically about love. You may have learned in grade school that haiku is a very old Japanese poetic form that follows a 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable format. But did you know the logo of National Haiku Writing Month is actually a 5-7-5 with a big red X over it? For those fluent in Japanese, 5-7-5 is a problematic English approximation of what is actually going on in Japanese haiku. If you adore 5-7-5 (I’m looking at you, Jeremy Bratt), this is not to say that you can’t write a haiku in English in 5-7-5; it’s just that 5-7-5 is not the essence of what makes a haiku a haiku.

What is arguably more important than the syllable count or line breaks in a haiku is that it captures one tableau-like image or idea, often invoking nature in a particular season or element of time, and containing a moment of pivot or juxtaposition. If you’d like to really get into the nitty gritty, you can read more about the haiku form here.

Do you have a favorite haiku or other poem you’d like to see featured? Send it my way! And once again, Happy National Poetry Month!

— Ellen

The haiku form has previously been featured for Poem-A-Day April 24, 2018, Poem-A-Day April 13, 2015, and Poem-A-Day April 29, 2011 (which includes the shirt I am wearing today!).

If you’re a fan of short, also check out this selection of previously featured poems shorter than haiku.

Happy (Almost) National Poetry Month!

Hello Friends!

For those of you who don’t know, I have been running a poem-a-day email list for the past twelve Aprils (I can’t believe it’s been that long, but it has!) to celebrate National Poetry Month — which starts tomorrow!

I would like to invite you to join my poem-a-day list (it’s only 30 days long!) — Just reply to this email, or sign up through my blog meetmein811.org — where you can also find an archive of the past eleven years of poem-a-days.

No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! I’m not going to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand (hopefully). What will I send you? Well, last April we read poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s. We read poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, API poets, Native poets, mixed race poets, and white poets. We read poems by women, men, genderqueer and non-binary poets, gay poets, lesbian poets, and bisexual poets. We read pantoum, ode, haiku, spoken word, sonnets, quatrains, quintets, and sestets. Somehow I didn’t really send any tercets last year — so I’m definitely going to have to include some tercets this year! (I should probably hyperlink what each of these poetry words mean; I promise I explain them as each comes up.)

My selections do skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves). This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work — this gives me a freedom other poem-a-day lists do not have to choose whichever poems I want to include, as well as the freedom to include commentary, analysis, personal stories, and other tidbits that I hope make poetry more accessible. I also frequently refer my audience the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month, for a more official poem-a-day email list.

Are you in? Sign up here.

Thanks, and Happy (Almost) National Poetry Month!

Love,
Ellen