National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month in the US. Most publishers hold their new collected volumes and compilations back until second and third quarter of the fiscal year, and certainly any well-known single author works do well if they are still in trade cloth and on display at the local big box bookstore. I wonder why April was chosen? Could it be the immortal line from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland "April is the cruelest month" caused publishers and librarians to feel the need to apologize to a month that acts as harbinger of Spring?

I, for one, am consciously more moved to compose lines of poetry in the Autumn, but both the British and American literary canon share authors prolific en printemps. Much of the pastoral mode of verse finds setting in valleys of wildflowers, birds in canopies of trees of new buds, apple blossoms, daffodils, tulips, and more. The world re-awakening, the quickening of life, the cycle of rebirth, these are all themes within spring poetry.

Good poetry makes me feel this way. Something in me re-awakens each time I read Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Heaney, Levertov, Donne, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Wilbur, Neruda, Whitman, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Blake, cummings, Creeley, Pound, Olson, Gluck, Auden and more. I feel the quickening of Heaney's fecund earth, the primal joining of sound and breath that Ginsberg laid bare and Whitman encouraged, the deep seed power and philosophy and joy in so many of the others named above. These are the folks in my personal library, these are the words I return to as they are somehow eternal in my mind.