Celebrate Poetry Month

Happy Poetry Month! How are your celebrations going? Well, if you're not sure what to do yet here are a couple ideas to get you going:

1. Read a poem.

2. Put poetry in an unexpected place.

3. Send somebody a gift with a poem attached to it.

4. Keep a poem in your pocket.

5. Memorize a new poem.

6. Listen to poetry on your commute.

7. Host a poetry reading night

8. Watch a Poetry Film: Dead Poet’s Society.

9. Write a poem.

10. Attend an open-mike night.

If you have more ideas on how you would celebrate, we would love to hear your ideas too! Happy reading!

How to Enjoy Poetry More

Last week I brought up to my group of friends that it was poetry month. Upon that comment we began to discuss poetry and one of my friends pulled up a poem on his phone and read it out loud. It was fun and effective at celebrating poetry. We all sat down and spent about five to ten minutes talking about it and we all had fun and felt enriched afterwards.

 I'm not going to lie, this whole occasion really surprised me. But what it showed is that anyone at anytime can sit down and find a way to sincerely enjoy poetry.

Here are the tips I got out of my personal experience that align with poets.org's suggestions:

1. Read aloud. My friend read a poem to us, and I asked him to read it again. Poetry is about language and how it sounds, so it makes sense that hearing it enriches its meaning. The Academy of American Poets says to read it out loud more than once, it's much easier to figure out what is going on.
2. Discuss the poem. As soon as somebody in my group said the poem was about "death," it enlightened the meaning to me. Most things seem easier to get into when turned into a group event. 
3. Accept dualism. Poems never carry one meaning, they are inherently ambiguous. While I saw my friend's poem as transitions we face in life, others in the group drew the conclusion that the poem was about death. Because there is no right answer, I can take peace in knowing that I was right and they were right.

 I only stated a few ways to enjoy poetry, but I am sure there's plenty more. Walt Whitman said, "To have great poets there must be great audiences too." May we all find joy in poetry reading and become the great audiences needed to create great poets.


What do you do to enjoy poetry?


-Hillary

Poetry Month - Keep a Poem in Your Pocket

I love poetry month!   BYU Bookstore’s “share a poem to enter” drawing brings such a great variety of poems my way.  Each year I add poems to my collection that I have never heard before.   Poems that make me laugh, poems that send shivers through me at their pure beauty, poems that make me ponder life, poems that open a solution to a dilemma I’ve puzzled over,  or poems that bless me with an unforgettable epiphany of truth.  

Official 2012 flyer at poets.org. 

I think the best gift you can give new parents is a poetry anthology.  It offers the potential of hours of enjoyment.  If you are concerned with muti-tasking, a few moments spent with a child cuddled on your lap reciting or reading poetry can hardly be beat.  It establishes bonds, values, love of words and learning, deep thinking or comic relief.  Memorization of simple nursery rhymes grows into the ability to remember epic poems, math facts, scriptures.  

I am convinced of this by years of watching students in my library who were struggling and their improvement when the lore of memorizing poems drew them in.  I know it is not the cure for all the world’s problems but keeping a poem in your pocket, or in your head can help.  This month I celebrate that!

Keep a Poem In Your Pocket

By: Beatrice Schenk de Regniers

Keep a poem in your pocket

and a picture in your head

and you'll never feel lonely

at night when you're in bed.

The little poem will sing to you

the little picture bring to you

a dozen dreams to dance to you

at night when you're in bed.

So---

Keep a picture in your pocket

and poem in your head

and you'll never feel lonely

at night when you're in bed. 

-Anita

Poetry Month - On Reading Poetry

Poetry often seems like a stiff conversation to bring up with anybody outside of the literary community.

A person who pursues other interests may think these poems aren't relevant to them.

Perhaps the desire was never kindled due to high school teachers who followed the rule of the textbook when the topic of poetry came up.

I was a luckier individual. I had an excellent teacher in high school for my Advanced Placement Language and Writing class who never followed convention when it came to teaching. One of my most prominent memories in that class happened when we reached the poetry unit.

For the college credit test we inevitably would analyze a poem. My class became incredibly concerned as soon as she informed us about this requirement. But the simple advice she gave has forever stood out to me in my memory, and this advice helped me perform better with the poetry section of the exam than any other section. She said,

"Don't try to read too critically with poetry, just look at the word selection and structure and enjoy the language."

That was it, really. I turned off my analytic brain that tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together and instead  give in to the right side of my brain. Poets aren't mathematicians: they aren't giving you a problem that needs a correct answer. They want individual experiences to come in their interpretation. Poetry is expression, and reading poetry is expression also.

Perhaps the message is that poetry is intended to enrich the human condition. I think this message was better spoken in the 1989 film, "Dead Poets Society."



As this poetry week commences, I hope we all get a chance to appreciate poetry for at least one day of the month.

-Hillary