4.04.2014

A poem a day for National Poetry Month

Throughout the month of April, I'm trying to share a new poem on Twitter each day. Thanks to Rachel Held Evans for the inspiration.

Updated April 23, 2014





  • April 1: Letter needing no stamp, "Mr. Zed"

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  • April 2: Summer Storm, Dana Giaoia - one of my all-time favorites. I heard him recite this poem at an event in San Francisco, and it cast a spell over the room, the way some songs do when, after you play the last note, you find yourself sitting quietly at the piano for a beat or two. "Summer Storm" appears in Gioia's Interrogations at Noon.

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  • April 3: Across a New Dawn, Kofi Awoonor (Ghanaian poet killed at the Nairobi mall last year). Awoonor's book The Promise of Hope was released last month.
  • April 4: Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - one of my childhood favorites; I love the words' sing-song music. Rereading it now, though, that book might have only kept the high points and dropped a great deal of the battle.
  • April 5: Funeral Blues, W. H. Auden
  • April 6: Christ's Passion, Mary Karr (via Micha Boyett)
  • April 7: The Mark of the Beast/The Mark of the Lamb, Tania Runyan from the January/February Books and Culture
  • April 8: A Miracle for Breakfast, Elizabeth Bishop. Years ago, when I lived in New York, I used to enjoy the short poems you'd find on the subway or bus, amid the advertisements for blemish corrections, foot-pain cures and housing programs. Each was included as part of the MTA's great Poetry in Motion program.

    One day - I think it was when I rode the bus to downtown Brooklyn to follow up on a jury-duty notice I forgot to respond to - I looked up and saw a wonderful Elizabeth Bishop poem floating above my head in the grimy panel. I liked it so much that I added it to one of the chapters in my memoir. But I've been slow to read more of Bishop since then, though I bought at least one volume of her work. That means many treasures more to discover.
  • April 11: Slow Pleasures, Luci Shaw (which I heard her read at the Festival of Faith and Writing, along with several others whose titles I didn't catch). 
  • April 12: Selections from Carver: A life in poems by Marilyn Nelson. I'd not read about his life for years, but this novel approach to biography is really wonderful. 
  • April 16: #workhaiku
  • April 17: More #workhaiku
  • April 18: Knowledge of Self, Amiri Baraka
  • April 20: Forever, Ben Harper
  • April 21: Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant
  • April 23: Sonnets, William Shakespeare - Because today's the day people celebrate his birth. And supposedly he would have turned 450 today. (Perhaps fittingly, his first few sonnets discuss aging.)
  • April 24: #workhaiku
  • April 25: Haiku from the @nytmetro haiku project (via Michael Luo)
  • April 28: Bluebird, Charles Bukowski, which I know best from Over the Rhine's tribute to it on The Long Surrender.
  • April 29: Four a.m .in the Woods, Marilyn Nelson, from Carver: A life in poems.
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