April is National Poetry Month

It's April . . . which means it's National Poetry Month. Poetry is everywhere.

Poetry is in you. It's in the air you breathe. The chair you sit. And the car

you drive. It is simple. It is complex. It is everything. It is nothing.

So don't just sit there . . . get creative! Want a place to start? Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Susan Wooldridge is one of the best poetry writing books ever. The author gives you great tips such as collecting words and creating a wordpool: "A word can trigger or inspire a poem, and words in a stack or thin list can up make up poems" (p.10).

Other great things she talks about include grocery weeping (and we're not just talking about the cost of your grocery bill or wilted lettuce), joywriting, poem sound and song, fear of poetry (come on, some of you have it), dreamsense and being visited by words. Imagine answering the knock on your door and there at the open door stands the word "awesome". I'd like to be visited and told that I am awesome. As Wooldridge says, "Writing this way seems like being visited. And as with any visitor, I have to make room and time" (p. 190).

Or you can go online and play at "magnetic poetry." You know, those little word magnets that you put on your fridge and rearrange to make a poem. You can go here to create your own magnetic poetry.

Or use the following URL and make any page you love into your own person magnetic poetry kit. Simple replace the part after the url= with your own web address and presto - it is magnetic poetry. Here's this blog done as magnetic poetry.

http://wearehugh.com/public/2003/02/poetry.cgi?url=teenservicesmarionpubliclibrary.blogspot.com

So have fun with poetry this month . . . and remember the words of Piri Thomas:

"Each child is born a poet and every poet is a child."