Celebrate Poetry!

Greetings, poetry mavens! National Poetry Month is winding to a close, but did you know that today is Poem in Your Pocket Day? The idea is simple: select a poem you love, then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends today. The website Poets.org has many examples that you can print out!

Additionally, the library catalog has several new poetry books for adults, young adults, & children, including Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America's Poets. This book received a starred review from Booklist magazine, which said

"From 1970 to 1998, Pearl London conducted a 'Works in Progress' poetry course
at the New School in Greenwich Village, inviting poets to bring manuscripts of
poems they were struggling with and offer them up for dissection and
discussion.These remarkably candid and inspiring conversations about aesthetic
and moral matters would have faded from memory if a stash of forgotten cassette
tapes hadn't been found after London's death in 2003. Writer and former New
Schooler Neubauer selected and judiciously edited 23 exciting interviews, which,
accompanied by photographs of the poets and reproductions of their manuscripts,
reveal what poets do and why they do it. Maxine Kumin and Robert Hass have
opposite views about abstraction in poetry. June Jordan speaks of poetry and
politics. Galway Kinnell calls for a new form of nature poems. Derek Walcott
speaks of the "honesty of the line." Extraordinary moments with Frank Bidart,
Amy Clampitt, Lucille Clifton, Edward Hirsch, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, and
James Merrill create a treasury of passionate and enlightening exchanges that
illuminate the very life force of poetry."

Other new titles include: The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette's Journey to Cuba by Margarita Engle, a verse novel based on the letters and diaries of Fredrika Bremer, a mid-nineteenth-century Swedish feminist and traveler; Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland (his fourth poetry collection); &, for younger readers, Ubiquitous: Poetry & Science about Nature's Survivors by Joyce Sidman. For more poetry books, try a subject or keyword search using the word 'poetry'.