National Poetry Month

National Poetry Month was established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 with the intention to increase appreciation for poetry.

President Bill Clinton introduced National Poetry Month, declaring it an opportunity to "inspire a new generation of Americans to learn the power of reading and writing at its best."

To coincide with the festivities, free books and posters are sometimes distributed during April, while publishers and booksellers promote and re-release popular poetry collections.

Annually, the Academy hosts a benefit gala called "Poetry & the Creative Mind," where artists, public figures, and guest speakers assemble in support of National Poetry Month. Guest readers at the 2008 event included Meryl Streep, Katie Couric, and Jonathan Demme.

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• "Self-Portrait at 28" by David Berman

• Julia: I was never much of a poetry lover until I discovered that guys that David Berman of indie rock dream team the Silver Jews wrote poetry with lines like, "I am trying to get at something, and I want to talk very plainly to you so that we are both comforted by the honesty." That seems like the goal of most great art to me. The line comes from "Self-Portrait at 28," one of my favorite poems, because it captures how you feel, right there at 28 and maybe a little bit beyond. You'll find it included in the collection Actual Air.

• Amazon: Actual Air

• PoemHunter: "Self-Portrait at 28" by David Berman

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• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

• Jonathan: Eliot's poem is a beautiful examination of the "modern man". Written in in the early 1910s, it depicts a neurotic, paranoid speaker with too much knowledge for his own good. He becomes obsessed with the women who pass him by and what they may say about him. The modern man, Eliot postulates, does not partake of "toast and tea", as all he has *time for are the "hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions." Want to learn more? Read the poem, then check out the Spark Notes.

• Bartleby: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

• Amazon.com: T.S. Eliot: The Poems

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• "Sad Steps" by Philip Larkin

• Juan: "Sad Steps" by Philip Larkin is a lot of things. On the surface, it's an allusion to Sonnet 31 of Elizabethan poet Sir Phillip Sydney's sonnet cycle Astophel and Stella. Peeling back the layers shows that it is also an analysis of the poetic convention of pathetic fallacy, which is the personification of the moon (yes, there is a term for that). These are both big reasons the poem is studied in universities across the world, but they may also be the least interesting things about it. The poem is something of an inversion of the zeal and vigor of youth. It describes an older man staring out of his window at the moon late at night. He is not up specifically to gaze at the moon's beauty, but was compelled, probably despite a desire to stay asleep in bed, to get up and go to the bathroom. The man's ruminations are not engaging despite his bitterness, but because of it: he finds himself staring at the moon and pondering the tenuous hold he once had on youth, and that somewhere, beneath the same moon, someone else's grip on youth is slipping as his did long ago. Buttressed by stark and vivid imagery, the poem's sense of dejection is clear, beautiful, and sad.

• Art of Europe: Phillip Larkin's Sad Steps

• Luninarium.org: Sir Phillip Sydney's Sonnet 31 from Astophel and Stella

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• "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden

• Lon: Auden's poem is a reaction to the painting "Fall of Icarus" by Peter Breughel, which features the legendary Greek mythological figure plummeting to Earth while life around him goes on pretty much as normal. Though it could be suggested that Brueghel's take on the Icarus legend is comical - he shows the boy who flew too close to the sun submurged head-first under water, with his legs kicking up in the air - Auden's poem is something of a lamentation about the insignificance of our lives, how even that which seems centrally important in the moment is essentially mundane and quotidian to those around us. Even a "dreadful martyrdom," the central event of several major world religions, must run its course "anyhow, in a corner." The title of the poem refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, where Auden viewed the painting in 1938.

• Wikipedia: W.H. Auden

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• "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond", by e.e. cummings

• Ryan M: One of my favorite poems, the last line forms the epigraph to the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie. What is unsettling about Cummings is the way he sensualizes punctuation, and uses punctuation marks, in a pre-emoticon way, to express every range of emotion. His parentheses are smiles and frowns (often at the same time) and his lack of spacing between the colons, commas, semicolons and other words makes a grammarian uncomfortable, but (to me) insinuates the closeness we are supposed to feel to the subject of the poem, and insinuates the rules Cummings is willing to break -- in punctuation and in his life -- to get closer to the truth of what he is feeling.

• Poets.org: somewhere i have never travelled