National Poetry Month

On this last day of National Poetry Month, Poetry Super Highway has something special for you. Beginning at midnight EST, you may download any of 70 e-books as part of the Great Poetry E-Book Free-for-All. There will be a link on the front page of Poetry Super Highway that will lead you to the e-books.

Also, Billy the Blogging Poet is in charge of the 2nd Annual Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere election. Here is a list of nominees, and you may vote here.

This is also a good time to remind everyone that Billy the Blogging Poet has a very nice children's' poetry site, LaureatesKids.com.

Speaking of children...most of us were first introduced to poetry as children. Nursery rhymes, jump rope rhymes, and street chants and burned into our minds forever. That is how we learn the rhythm of words. I remember this rhyme and this rhyme. Most of us were also required to memorize some poems in school. I do not recall which ones I was told to memorize, however.

Little children are introduced to poetry through rhyme because rhyme is pleasing to the ear and easy to memorize. I am searching my memory for poems I was required to study as an adolescent and college student, and the one that comes to mind immediately is Matthew Arnold's "To Marguerite: Continued." I had an English professor with a rich, deep voice, and he read it to us aloud. It remains a poem of which I am especially fond. Most of us also studied Arnold's "Dover Beach," too. And the famous rondeau, "In Flanders Fields," by John McCrae.

I recall being excited when I first discovered Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W.H. Auden, and Robert Frost. Once, at some type of leadership conference, I was involved in a group reading of Carl Sandburg's poetry. It was actually more like performance art (a term I did not know at the time).

In the 80's, I wrote a poem for the first time in my life. I no longer have it, but I recall that it was a decent poem. I then fell back into my belief that I was not capable of writing poetry, and I remained there until the turn of the century, at which time I took a brief poetry-writing course to get me started. I now concentrate more on poetry than I do short fiction and essays, although that situation is likely to change, as I tend to go throuh phases with my writing. I enjoy writing in both free verse and forms, though I find formal poetry more difficult to write.