Poetry

Crowd-pleasing poems for Poetry Month.

Upon learning of the president’s death, the nation responded with shock, confusion, outrage, and sorrow. This tumultuous period was captured by the printing and photography of the time: both in immediate ephemera and later, more contemplative works.

The Doughnut Boy and Other Poems offers a glimpse of New York City through the eyes of a sassy little beret-wearing, doughnut-loving, public-transit-taking, library-visiting child.

April is National Poetry Month! To celebrate here at The New York Public Library we recorded thirty of our librarians and other staff members reading a favorite poem.

Though National Poetry Month is coming to an end, you can continue to celebrate all year long! You don't have to read poetry to celebrate; you can create it instead.

The Den is warm today With April sun Just in time For Poetry Month! More epistolary poetry: letters in the form of a poem.

After the winter we've had, I've been really looking forward to April. With the longer daylight hours, signs of green, and chances to enjoy the city's parks and rivers without shivering, I feel something in my brain waking up and it seems natural to break out the poetry.

Shel Silverstein's poems are humorous; no one can deny this.

In "How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes," kids learn how to avoid this onerous chore. Silverstein's advice? Drop one onto the floor. The illustration includes a huge dish that is covering a girl's entire body.

The poem about babysitter, "The Sitter" is quite unexpected.

Mrs. McTwitter the baby-sitter

I think she's a little bit crazy.

She thinks a baby-sitter's 

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.

In the poem "Brand X," a cat was acting for a commercial for cat food. Wouldn't you know it? When asked to choose between 

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.

I made a

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."

Haiku is one of the more accessible poetic forms (have you ever tried writing a sestina?), at least for the likes of me. There are, of course, books galore of and about them, but a short and sweet

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 

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.

His birthday is June 1.

Here's 

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.

To be called a "mout amassi" 

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. 

Outside Your Window: A First Book of 

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

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.

I selected four great poets — and distinguished scholars training new generations — who published collections in 2010 and 2011. I found history, current events and the future in their works; and grace, beauty, heartache, struggles and 

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.

His famous poem "Marriage" can 

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