One Chance to Celebrate National Poetry Month

Kelly sent me a couple of poems by email during the month.... trying to grease the skids and get me thinking about National Poetry month.   Alas, it did no good.

But just today I read the last of them and thought about taking the time to celebrate an art form that has always touched my heart.  Sat for a little while and thought about poets who have reached back in time... to those they learned from, to those poets who have touched their hearts.  Poets do get mawkish about other poets.

And so I remembered a contemporary poem that I loved, because the poetess fell in love with poetry when she read Neruda.   As did I.   So I went looking, to take the opportunity to have one last celebration of the month I ignored....one print of a poem I love.  In, it, she personifies Neruda, as though he were here with her.  Great visualization!   And here it is:



Neruda's Hat

   by Kelli Russell Agodon


On a day when weather stole every breeze,

Pablo told her he kept bits of his poems

tucked behind the band in his hat.



He opened the windows to nothing

but more heat, asked her to wander with him

down to the beach, see if their bodies

could become waves.



When they returned he placed his hat,

open to sky, in the center of the table.

She filled it with papaya, figs, searched

for scraps of poems beneath the lining.



By evening, the hat was empty

and his typewriter, full

with pages that began something about ocean,

something about fruit.



And they didn't notice the sky, full of tomorrow's

stars or the blue and white swallow

carrying paper in its beak.



They sat outside until the edge of daylight

stretched itself across a new band of morning,

the shadow of a hat washing onto the shore.

    Enjoy.   Quid

National Poetry Month - Maya Angelou

I spent a lot of the last decade in the throes of insomnia. All that has faded in the last three years, as I left menopause behind, and now it is rare that I don't get 6 good hours or more of sleep each night. I also take time to wake and spend a stolen 1/2 or hour in bed once I wake up, just lazing and getting prepared for the next day.

Something went wrong last night, and I last looked at the clock at 4 a.m. after fighting sleeplessness all night. I recalled a poem by the incomparable Angelou that I used to be fond of, and called it up as a "joke on me" this April Fools Day.

Enjoy!

Insomniac

by Maya Angelou

There are some nights when

sleep plays coy,

aloof and disdainful.

And all the wiles

that I employ to win

its service to my side

are useless as wounded pride,

and much more painful.

Today's Poem "Sixty"

SIXTY

By Stephen Dunn (from his Pulitzer Prize collection, “Different Hours”)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393322327/ref=nosim/rambles#noop


Because in my family the heart goes first

and hardly anybody makes it out of his fifties,

I think I'll stay up late with a few bandits

of my choice and resist good advice.

I'll invent a secret scroll lost by Egyptians

and reveal its contents: the directions

to your house, recipes for forgiveness.

History saysmyventricles are stone alleys,

my heart itself a city with a terrorist

holed up in the mayor's office.

I'm in the mood to punctuate

only with that maker of promises, the colon:

next, next, next, its says, God bless it.

As García Lorca may have written: some people

forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster

could fall on their heads at any moment.

My sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.

Come, play poker with me,

I want to be taken to the cleaners.

I've had it with all stingy-hearted sons of bitches.

A heart is to be spent. As for me, I'll share

my mulcher with anyone who needs to mulch.

It's time to give up the search for the invisible.

On the best of days there's little more

than the faintest intimations. The millennium,

my dear, is sure to disappoint us.

I think I'll keep on describing things

to ensure that they really happened.

It's Here! National Poetry Month

The 2010 poster features the lines "We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough." from Wallace Stevens's poem "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" The design is by Marian Bantjes.

I had a great time blogging during National Poetry month in April last year. I'm gonna try again...each day a favorite poem; or an original from me.

Can't find or write poetry for every day of the month? Just don't want to?

Well, then, save yourself for : BAD POETRY DAY, AUGUST 18

Dreamed up by Thomas and Ruth Roy, you can find a truly bad poem that someone loves on each and every poetry site. Compose some really rotten verse for this day, rather than post during April. But, this month, come back and find some truly great poetry I'm planning for readers.....