Poetry Month

I love the cat breed illustrations on the inside of the front and back covers of this book. All of the cats look so happy! The book is full of poems that indicate the nature of cats, and anyone who has experience with cats or who has lived with cats knows exactly what Crawley is talking about in these cat poems.

I can't say that I've always been the biggest poetry fan. But lately I've been getting into novels in verse, which have been popping up all over the YA Fiction scene for awhile now. Ellen Hopkins is the queen of this and if you've never read her work before, do yourself a favor and check out Crank as soon as possible. You will be hooked... freaked out... and hooked.

Abril es el Mes Nacional de la Poesia. Te invito a celebrar con poesías, escogidas al azar, para adornar tu día, y llevar a cualquier lugar...

Fang and I were very, very lucky during the hurricane. We were out of power for only 24 hours, during which I wrote the three haiku below: "On the Advantages of the Absence of Electricity."

Mark Van Doren edited and published An Anthology of World Poetry in 1929. Amazingly, this enabled him to buy the house at 393 Bleecker Street. Van Doren was a poet himself and a playwright and a greatly admired professor at Columbia University.

Before he was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, John Masefield scrubbed floors in a saloon at Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue in the Village.

My guess, that's good training to be a poet or a writer of any kind.

As a young girl growing up in Jamaica — and later in Brooklyn, NY — I often heard the poetry of Louise Bennett (Jamaicans affectionately call her "Miss Lou") permeate the air. One of my earliest recollections of Miss Lou’s lyricism was hearing the term mout amassi (big mouth). The term comes from the title of one of her most popular poems about a young lady, Liza, who loves to gossip and chat.

In New York City, there is a lot to celebrate during the month of April, National Poetry Month. It feels like poems fill the air as the weather warms, flowers bloom, animals come out of hiding, and, of course, Earth Day arrives!  No worries if you missed it yesterday, this post will help you and your children celebrate our Earth (and her fantastic creatures!) with a few recommendations from NYPL's vast collection of poetry for young people. 

You have not crossed the bridges I have crossed.
You have not listened to the music I have listened to.
You have not been in the top of the World Trade Center the way I have been there.
You have not seen the waves I have seen.
You have not fallen from horses the way I have fallen.
You have not felt the guns on your neck the way I have felt them.
You have not been in the sea with a big storm in a little boat the way I have been.

—Excerpt from "Don’t Give Me Advice," by Luis Marin, Tompkins Square CRW

This month is National Poetry Month, and here at the Center for Reading and Writing (CRW) some 

April is National Poetry Month, and I promised myself to read a poem a day. Some poets of the black experience immediately came to mind: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, Sonia Sanchez, Audrey Lorde, to name a few. But then I decided to venture unto new territory and immerse myself into recent works.

Gregory Corso was born at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. His family lived near Bleecker and MacDougal streets at the time of his birth.

His birthday is March 26.

The house is for sale again, apparently — One of the most famous in Greenwich Village, 75 1/2 Bedford Street, otherwise known as the skinniest house in New York.

Formerly, it was the home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her birthday is February 22.

Amy Lowell was a poet who lived for a time at 61 Washington Square in New York City. February 9 is her birthday.

Perhaps it's because audiences for poetry are a bit smaller than some of the other genres I'm drawn to, but whenever I finally get around to reading a poet others have recommended to me, it seems like knocking on the door to a little club of sorts. When the poet is as interesting as David Shapiro, one hopes to return to that door again and again.  

If you are of a certain age, you may be familiar with Edwin Arlington Robinson from a Simon and Garfunkel song, "Richard Cory." The words of the song were changed somewhat from what Robinson wrote but it still ended with the same shocking, brutal conclusion. Here’s the whole poem:

Muriel Rukeyser, poet and activist, was born on December 15, 1913.

She lived in Westbeth at Bethune and West Streets in the West Village.

Her words will tell you more about her than anything I can write:

Every November, the searches for Stanley Horowitz on Google gain momentum. Horowitz, a poet, published a tranquil 18 word poem in the November 1983 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine, page 109. Some years later the poem was posted to a list of autumn quotations on the Internet, sandwiched between poetry giants like John Keats and Robert Frost, and it has been used ubiquitously all over the web ever since. 

Slam Poetry is alive and well in New York City and beyond. Check out this slam the NYPL and Urban Word hosted at the Bronx Library Center, featuring the Precision Poetry Drill Team.  With so many of the Urban Word visiting poets coming from the Slam tradition, I want to take a moment and discuss the art form and point you towards exciting Slam events, videos, and resources in New York City.

Slam poetry is a new and unique development in modern literature. Activism through poetry, however, has been around for as long as the art form itself has. I’ve never had a cup of coffee and talked shop with any of the Urban Word Masterpoets, but I’d love to. I want to share some of the history and tradition of activism in African-American art and culture. Best of all, books and CDs of all of the artists mentioned here are available at your local NYPL. If a library doesn’t have a copy on the shelf, you can always request materials be sent to your local branch at catalog.nypl.org or nypl.biblicommons.com.