NATIONAL POETRY MONTH ROUND-UP FOR 2013 (AND I DON'T MEAN THE HERBICIDE)

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I can't believe it! It's the last day of April and National Poetry Month has come to an end for this year. Somehow, I managed to put up a post everyday. I am now even more in awe of people who blog practically every day all the time and still manage to produce books of their own. 

I started out the month thinking I might try to write a poem a day, but as I really didn't want to put them all up on my blog (god forbid I should write a good one and then not be able to get it published elsewhere).  So I started pulling poetry books off my shelves and writing about them. That turned out to be great fun. I got to revisit books I'd shelved, in some cases, decades ago. 

When I wasn't blogging about poetry I was reading it. Literary Press Group's poem-a-day blog (for an idea of what we poets are up against, just read the beginning of the link), the League of Canadian Poets'  also posted a poem a day, as did too many other blogs and zines to count. From the other side of the 49th, Your Daily Poem (shameless linking to one of my own there) drops one into my email box every day, and they ramp up for April, too. Not that I read every single post that came my way, but every time I dipped in I was off on another romp in the poetry fields. 

Here are the books I blogged about this month. I was planning to get a picture of all of them (perhaps with me collapsed in the middle, or crushed by their very weight or something) but I'm not home yet so that will have to wait.

Stickboy ~ Shane Koyczan

Small Hallows ~ Gabriel Wainio-Théberge

Impact: theTitanic poems ~ Billeh Nickerson

Something Small to Carry Home ~ Isa Milman

The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems ~ Nancy Holmes

Monkey Ranch ~ Julie Bruck

Why Are You So Sad? ~ David W. McFadden

Framed ~ Dawn Marie Kresan

Dis ease and De sire—the M anu S cript ~ Kim Clark

Philosopher at the Skin Edge of Being ~ Susan Andrews Grace

What Big Teeth–Red Riding Hood’s Real Life ~ Lana Hechtman Ayers

prisoner ~ Linda Pyke

Small Corners ~ Pat Smekal

Genève ~ George Bowering

This Poem ~ Adeena Karasick

So yes, Mr. Custom's Officer, people are still "making" poetry. They're writing it and putting it into books and online and hanging it from trees. I hope this continues for a long time to come. And you know, I'm pretty sure it will.

Thanks for stopping by. You can be sure I'll be back soon with more poetry stuff, just not every flippin' day! 

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