For National Poetry Month

It's certainly not your grandma's poetry.  Last week Gill Sotu and a couple of other slam poets performed in my daughter's high school English class, in celebration of National Poetry Month.  The students then attempted to write some slam poetry of their own.  My daughter enjoyed this workshop quite a bit.

National Poetry Month began in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, and is now held every April.  During the month of April, schools, libraries, booksellers, poets, and  bloggers throughout the U.S. celebrate poetry by participating in readings, festivals, workshops, and other events.


All month long, I've noticed numerous posts devoted to poetry and National Poetry Month on various book blogs, including Savvy Verse and Wit and The Parrish Lantern.  This morning, I encountered  book spine poetry on Leslie's blog, Under My Apple Tree, and decided to try "writing" a poem in this way.  The idea is to form a short poem using the titles of books.

I am the messenger

Dancing with gravity

Outside the ordinary world

Perfectly untraditional.

Creating a poem from the titles on book spines was harder than I thought it would be.  At first, I had the idea to use titles from books of poetry, but I found that the ones I had on hand (several chapbooks of poems by Sweta Srivastava Vikram), were too thin to show the titles.  So I decided to use novels instead.  I've read each of the books shown here, and reviewed three of them (I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak, Dancing with Gravity by Anene Tressler, and Perfectly Untraditional by Sweta Srivastava Vikram).

Have you been celebrating National Poetry Month? Your comments, especially written as poems, are welcomed.