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Celebrate National Poetry Month in April

Give poetry a chance. Celebrate spring by discovering poems you can understand

Are you like millions of Americans who are turned off by poetry?

“I don’t understand poems,” you might say. Or, “I like reading novels, but I just don’t ‘get’ poetry.”

The month of April – the time of blooming daffodils and songbirds settling down for their next broods – is National Poetry Month, as declared in 2006 by the Academy of National Poets.

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Here’s a challenge for you. Rummage through your shelves and select a book of poetry, possibly from the days when you were in high school or college. Find a solitary place, perhaps out in the back yard, leaf through the pages, and find one poem you enjoy.

Announce to your family or a friend that you’d like to read them this poem in honor of National Poetry Month.

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Poets are a diverse assortment of individuals, who speak of their deepest feelings, through the condensed rhythms that only poetry allows.

A friend of mine is getting married. I sent her a gift plus this "haiku" in the traditional format.

     Two rivers wandered

     - Tracey Lynn and Mark Thomas –

     Now! Oceans of Love  

It’s now in the middle of her refrigerator.

Richard Berlin is a psychiatrist in the Berkshires of MA. He is also an award-winning poet. In our country with its prejudice against older people, Berlin writes these moving lines from his poem “Sleight of Hand:”   

   Old as my grandmother, / she smiles up at me, / breath gentle and lulled,

   her fears distracted / by my questions and patter…. / I palpate her breast,

   feel her flesh/ like decayed leaves crushed/ by time to a star of coal…

   Her laughter breaks my trance:/ You shoud have seen them when I was        younger.

Nothing is more moving than listening to a live poetry presentation. Several years ago, I heard former priest, Edwin Romond, who is now married, read his stunningly honest poetry about his teaching years. Kids can be so cruel:

From “To My Female Student Who Left a Note Stating, ‘I Hope Your Baby’s Born Dead’:

   What was it, a lav pass / I wouldn’t give you?

   A quiz grade I wouldn’t change? / Had I made you stop chewing gum?

   Where does a teenage girl / who is blessed with a womb

   and the chance for children / find the emptiness inside her

   to write a death wish for a baby?

   But, my anonymous student / you didn’t hate hard enough

   for my son’s eyes light with a life / more beautiful than yours……

As we see, poems can be written about anything. Edwin Romond told us at his presentation in the Lambertville, NJ, library, that when he and a neighbor met when they were taking out their garbage, the neighbor said, “So, I suppose you’ll be writing about garbage night?”

Poets, like me, who suffer from manic-depression (now known as bipolar disorder) and depression are legion. Perhaps you have heard of some of them: Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, John Keats, and Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995. She was 47 years old.  

Kenyon, who was married to Donald Hall, a U.S. Poet Laureate, writes in her book “Let Evening Come” of the simple pleasures of every day life on Hall’s family farm in New Hampshire.

From the title poem, Kenyon writes about death - which she calls “evening” -  in these hopeful words:

   … Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned / in long grass / Let the stars appear   

   and the moon disclose her silver horn

   Let the fox go back to its sandy den. / Let the wind die down. Let the shed

   go black inside. Let evening come.

  To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop / in the oats, to air in the lung

   let evening come.

   Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid / God does not leave us

   comfortless, so let evening come.

“Death” might be the most popular subject there is in poetry.

Dylan Thomas on the death of his father: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rage at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

And who can forget these immortal lines from “The Belle of Amhurst” Emily Dickinson:

   Because I could not stop for Death –

   He kindly stopped for me – 

   The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 

   And Immortality.

David Moak of Philadelphia turned to poetry when his six-year-old daughter died. And Gregory Orr, wrote poetry to console himself about the tragic hunting death of his younger brother.

In “Gathering the Bones Together,” he writes: “I was twelve when I killed him;/ I felt my own bones wrench from my body.”

Enough about tragedy! When I was a teenager living in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, a colleague of my dad, Marcus, visited our house for the first time.

He brought me a slender volume of the poetry of William Wordsworth. I was astonished by its beauty and sensitivity and read it again and again, even setting some of the poems to music on the piano.

Who can forget his remarkable poem about the yellow daffodils whose lovely yellow heads are breaking free this very moment to greet Mother Sky?

   “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills /When all at once I saw a crowd, ‘A host, of golden daffodils….

To commemorate Poetry Month, my support group - New Directions for people with bipolar disorder, depression and their loved ones - installed a display case at the Upper Moreland Library, 109 Park Ave., Willow Grove, on view only until Monday. View it here.

On Easter Sunday, I will attend the funeral of a friend of mine, Ron Berman. To process my feelings for this unique, contentious, mental health advocate, I may just write a poem about him.

Resources:

Writing groups in the area:

Willow Grove Barnes and Noble, 102 Park Ave., Willow Grove 19090. Last Sunday of the month from 12 tro 2 pm.

Coffeeshop Writers Group, Willow Grove Giant Supermarket, in the coffeeshop, 315 York Road, Willow Grove 19090, first and third Saturdays from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.

Google “Philadelphia Writers Groups” and you’ll find many.

Selected Poetry from the Internet:

TheFloatingLibrary.com

 

 

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