Poetry is having its way with me

We’ve been observing National Poetry Month at Thursday Writers, a weekly drop-in writing practice group I’ve been part of since the mid-90s. The last two Thursdays, before the prompt that sparks the writing, we read a poem. Though generally writers write all over the  place—narrative prose mostly—I’m finding that reading the poems before we write seems to have an influence on the writing, at least with some of us. It certainly is having its way with me.

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My Month of Poetry

There are still a couple of days to get your poetry on during National Poetry Month. Though I didn’t get to nearly enough poetry readings during April, I did take in a couple. I was invited to read my own work at one of them. Here’s a poem that I read that night. It’s from the recently published Wild Women, Wild Voices chapbook that came out of last fall’s Wild Women Writing Workshop.

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Oh Joy! It’s National Poetry Month

npm2013_poster_540Let us start every day with a poem. Let us eat poetry for breakfast, brush our teeth with poetry. Let us say a poem out loud to anyone who’ll listen. Let us make a sandwich of poems and invite the world to lunch, take a book of poems to bed and dream metaphors. We’ll put poems in our pockets (Poem in Your Pocket Day, April 18) and empty them on the street corners of commerce for the common good.

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