Why Poetry?: Suggestions from the Collection
The New York Public Library is celebrating National Poetry Month throughout April! Discover everything the Library offers, including free events, poetry book recommendations, and fun ways to get involved on social media.
The question “Why Poetry?” is often asked by readers who are interested in cracking a spine of the genre, and right now, in April—National Poetry Month—is as good a time as any to once again seek an answer. Let’s set “Poetry” aside for a moment and ask, simply, “Why?” Because within a very few pared lines of crafted, deliberate language, what once was, still is, what felt singular becomes universal, and a sentiment or idea or observation read in haste or in study renders a renewed acknowledgment that humanity is a breathing and collective thing. And once read, that affirmation is never forgotten. The following poets, whose books are available for checkout in our collection, continue the conversation:
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks
edited by Elizabeth Alexander
When asked in a 1961 interview why she wrote poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks said: “I myself have only tried to record life and interpret it as I have seen it.” The first Black poet awarded the Pulitzer Prize, as well as to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Brooks wrote eloquently about the lives and circumstances surrounding her. Hers is a major voice of 20th-century American poetry.
War of the Foxes
by Richard Siken
“Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to another,” Richard Siken informs readers in a poem within this collection. All of his poetry is communicative: Seeking and sharing the specific toward a greater understanding of the whole.
The Book
by Mary Ruefle
The prose poems in this collection are as brazen as its title. Mary Ruefle, a poet of numerous accolades, is witty, honest, and manages to spite her own poetic inquiry of “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?’ in this, “The Book.”
The Penguin Anthology of 20th American Century Poetry
edited by Rita Dove
Was there ever a stanza gentler, more heartbreaking, than the one that opens “Those Winter Sundays,” by poet Robert Hayden? The lyrical verse of Hayden is informed by personal history, history-at-large, and classical studies. Find “Those Winter Sundays” and additional Hayden works, in this anthology.
I Ask The Impossible
by Ana Castillo
If a poem is titled “I Ask The Impossible,” it is most certainly a love poem. Castillo, a pioneer of the Chicana/x feminist poetry movement, was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2022 for poems that—like her title—speak of love and all things, in writing that captures attention and imagination, equally.
The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems
by Robert Frost
There is a reason why even those who are not poetry enthusiasts know of “The Road Not Taken,” and its divergent pathways. Frost not only received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, but also a Congressional Gold Medal for his achievement in the field of Arts and Letters, on behalf of poems whose structure and craft served only to enhance the seemingly mundane.
Whereas
by Layli Long Soldier
A citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, Long Soldier’s poems both detail and celebrate the civil and natural histories of Native American peoples and tribes in this collection, particularly, that declares: “Whereas I struggle to confess that I didn’t want to explain anything;” but proceeds to inform of many things, in a signature forthright eloquence that has earned her wide acclaim.
Book of My Nights
by Li-Young Lee
As if a poet taking a walk in the wilderness, this meditative, lyrical book of poems finds Lee in contemplation of how the natural world around him influences both physical and spiritual realities that speak to a larger, meditative practice.
Unshuttered: Poems
by Patricia Smith
A virtuoso, Smith is a poet skilled at creating a narrative voice within her work. This most recent collection of her poems is a literal example of that: “Unshuttered” contains stanzas that lyricize the anonymous lives Smith imagines belonged to the African Americans whose images she has collected in a number of 19th-century sepia-toned photographs. Those photographs are also included within this weighty, lovely volume.
Felicity
by Mary Oliver
The popularity of Mary Oliver grew increasingly during the pandemic; her poems celebrating the romance of natural wonder rose to the occasion of that moment. And even still. This slim volume is a further invitation to walk with Oliver through her Cape Cod landscape, where we, too, can ask ourselves our own plan for our “one wild and precious life.”