So much poetry! So little time! I have a couple of links for you to start off National Poetry Month, and an assignment (😏). First, here’s a short post I did recently for the wonderful literary journal Nimrod. It looks at the differences between poets & prose writers. And maybe, too, the differences between the readers of each. The post is this poet’s own experiences, bolstered by a few comments from far more famous writers, who agree: the two are very different. Duh, huh?
The second link is in the same vein — it’s a more researched look at those differences (there’s that word again) — between reading poetry and even ‘literary’ prose. And you know what? It’s even better for writers to read poetry — even if they write prose! (Which may be why some of the better prose writers in my creative writing program were the poets…)
Finally? Your assignment: find a poem you love & post it to social media — FB, Twitter, Reddit, whatever. I’ll start you off w/ a couple of mine, beginning with one I used as a model for a ‘golden shovel poem’ that was published recently in an online residency. (Thanks, Soft Cartel!) The poem is an old one, and possibly the first poem that really made me think HARD about social justice. It was 1972. It was Watergate. It was Việt Nam. And here came Ishmael Reed, a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra. Every word was a knife, a blade, white-hot & searing with a fierce beauty. It wouldn’t matter that he said crazy-ass things later. It would only matter that he wrote that poem at that time, and I read it.
So find a poem you can’t live without, and post it. Share it. Someone out there needs your poem. I guarantee it.
Tea and Breath 