April’s National Poetry Month goes virally high-tech-1st stanza
National Poetry Month is a month-long, national celebration of poetry established by the Academy of American Poets.
There are many, many online resources to celebrate!
The New York Times created a Tumblr to feature Haiku poetry, updated during the day. An algorithm checks the New York Times homepage for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. http://haiku.nytimes.com/
See also 7 Mobile Apps for Discovering and Creating Poetry
I love the National Poetry Foundation’s website with its Poet digest and a free download of it current issue. About Harriet is the Poetry Foundation’s blog for poetry and related news. The website also offers a Poem a day for email delivery.
For the most up-to-date information about the National Student Poets’ events, please visit Scholastic’s media room.
The Summer Day
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
from New and Selected Poems, 1992 Beacon Press, Boston, MA
