Hello Friends!
For those of you who don’t know, I have been running a poem-a-day email list for the past twelve Aprils (I can’t believe it’s been that long, but it has!) to celebrate National Poetry Month — which starts tomorrow!
I would like to invite you to join my poem-a-day list (it’s only 30 days long!) — Just reply to this email, or sign up through my blog meetmein811.org — where you can also find an archive of the past eleven years of poem-a-days.
No prior poetry experience is required to enjoy this poem-a-day list! I’m not going to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand (hopefully). What will I send you? Well, last April we read poems from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s. We read poems by Black poets, Latinx poets, API poets, Native poets, mixed race poets, and white poets. We read poems by women, men, genderqueer and non-binary poets, gay poets, lesbian poets, and bisexual poets. We read pantoum, ode, haiku, spoken word, sonnets, quatrains, quintets, and sestets. Somehow I didn’t really send any tercets last year — so I’m definitely going to have to include some tercets this year! (I should probably hyperlink what each of these poetry words mean; I promise I explain them as each comes up.)
My selections do skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves). This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work — this gives me a freedom other poem-a-day lists do not have to choose whichever poems I want to include, as well as the freedom to include commentary, analysis, personal stories, and other tidbits that I hope make poetry more accessible. I also frequently refer my audience the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month, for a more official poem-a-day email list.
Are you in? Sign up here.
Thanks, and Happy (Almost) National Poetry Month!
Love,
Ellen