In Celebration of National Poetry Month, I posted a poem to my Facebook page every day in April. I didn’t do any advance planning, just a quick internet search, sometimes on a particular subject, sometimes just visiting my favorite internet poetry haunts. With only a couple exceptions, every poem I posted was new to me, and I think It was one of the favorite things I’ve ever done on Facebook. Since these poems are soon to be buried in the inexorable roll of new posts, I’ve gathered all the links below in a kind of ad hoc and personal anthology.
It is difficultto get the news from poemsyet me die miserably every dayfor lackof what is found there.
“If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode to a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.” ~William Faulkner
9. America by Claude McKay, written in 1921, it feels grimly prescient today.A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad, he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can’t escape the field
18. Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth, another sonnet (The Prelude is one of my favorite long poems.)
19. The Body by Marianne Boruch:
has its little hobbies. The lunglikes its air best after supper,
goes deeper there to trade up
for oxygen, give everything else
away. (And before supper, yes,
during too, but there’ssomething about evening, that
slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,
still coming, still going … ) As for
bones—femur, spine,
the tribe of them in there—they harden
with use. The body would like
a small mile or two. Thank you.
It would like it on a bike
or a run. Or in the water. Blue.
And food. A habit that involves
a larger circumference where a garden’s
involved, beer is brewed, cows
wake the farmer with their fullness,
a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat
understands I will be crushed
into flour and starry-dust
the whole room, the baker
sweating, opening a window
to acknowledge such remarkable
confetti. And the brain,
locked in its strangedual citizenship, idles there in the body,
neatly terraced and landscaped.
Or left to ruin, such a brain,
wild roses growing
next to the sea. The body is
gracious about that. Oh, their
scent sometimes. Their
tangle. In truth, in secret,
the first thingin morning the eye longs to see.
20. For Women Who Are Difficult to Love by Warsan Shire
21. Catfish by Claudia Emerson (one of my favorite poets)
22. For Earth Day: Projection by Anna M. Evans
23. The Song of the Ungirt Runners by Charles Hamilton Sorley. Written shortly before he was killed in World War 1. Follow the link to read about the poem and the poet.
24. The Hidden by Truong Tran
25. The Young by Roddy Lumsden
26. Algebra of the Sky by David Hernandez found in Copper Nickel, an excellent place to find new poetry.
27. Cry of the Loon by Kai Carlson-Wee. Check out Button Poetry for lots of great spoken word poetry.
28. Completely Friday by Luis Garcia Montero
29. The Fall of Rome by W. H. Auden. This poem is easy to find so here’s an excellent essay.
30. The Mushroom Hunters by Neil Gaiman, read by Amanda Palmer.
