National Poetry Month

Of course we think poetry is important all the time, but since the Academy of American Poets initiated the celebration of National Poetry Month in 1996, the month of April has been a particularly good time to pay attention to poets and discover the ways poems can enrich your everyday life. We have a few suggestions for ways you can do this.

Readers share their stories about celebrating National Poetry Month—the ways they’ve found to bring poems and poets into their everyday lives during April.

A brief history of National Poetry Month, the annual celebration of poets and poetry in American life every April, initiated by the American Academy of Poets in 1996.

Eve Stern tells the story of her National Poetry Month experience selling books at Barnes & Noble: “I have been stationed in Suburbia... to teach Literature as a Foreign Language.”

A meditation on American Nobel laureate in poetry Joseph Brodsky and his vision of spreading poetry across the country, which inspired a young man named Andy Carroll to create the American Poetry & Literacy Project.

Charles Bernstein, Gray Professor of Po at Buffalo and author of the new indefinable My Way, wrote a hilarious sendup of the foibles of NatPoMo in 1999.

April is National Poetry Month in Canada, too (since 1999)—and you can find out what’s doing from the League of Canadian Poets.

To mark National Poetry Week in 2005, Slate published each week “a poem that derogates poetry itself or kvetches about bad poetry or denounces public taste in poetry,” selected by Robert Pinsky: Ben Jonson, Louise Bogan and Stevie Smith, Alexander Pope and Marianne Moore.

For preschoolers, kindergartners, 1st & 2nd graders, Scholastic provides step-by-step activity descriptions and a good bibliography.

Exercises, quizzes, activities & references for teachers to use in the classroom during National Poetry Month are all gathered on Teachervision.com’s theme page.