Happy April, people! The World Wide Web told me that April is National Poetry Month and I thought that it would be fun to kick it off by sharing some of my favorites. Poetry, and I, though I consider it a dear love of mine, have a pretty complicated relationship. I remember when I was a lot younger I thought that any string of sentences
with
a lot
of spaces
was a poem, and my early writing reflects that greatly. Interestingly enough, as I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve come to see that poetry is perhaps where my writing is the most honest, probably attributed to the fact that ideas for poems come to me one line at a time and are often strung together after the fact. I am no where near considering myself a poet, in fact, I was way too chicken to try out for the slam poetry team when I was in college, so I have great admiration for poets who are confident in their work and in their ability to present personal material that is able to resonate deeply with others.
I think I’m particularly drawn to poetry because I’m a naturally inquisitive person and you can find (or assign) meanings to poems via deep analysis. Even if you’re not doing this, poems are lyrical and fun and beautiful and can be enjoyed on a surface level as well.
Here are a spread of some poems I really like. What are you into?
Sonnet 55 – William Shakespeare
The Mouse’s Tale – Lewis Carroll (how much fun are concrete poems?!)
Bridget Smith | Storyteller, Memory Maker 