Column: It's National Poetry Month and there's reason to celebrate

On the last day of school, when I was in the fourth grade, we had a talent show in our classroom. It was quite impromptu; none of us had much talent. I had memorized the Lewis Carroll poem, “The Crocodile.” I loved the poem, which appears in “Alice in Wonderland,” and worked hard to commit it to memory.

Imagine my surprise when I was reminded, in preparing to write this column, that it is only eight lines long.

April is National Poetry Month, a fitting time to celebrate the joys of poetry. If we let them, poems can bring pleasure and light, inspiration and meaning, into our lives. But we have to be open to the idea that poetry is not just for intellectuals. It’s for everyone.

The silliness of “The Crocodile” is what appealed to me. The flowery language tickled me: “How doth the little crocodile/Improve his shining tail/And pour the waters of the Nile/On every golden scale!” It’s a parody of a pedantic, instructive poem, which I didn’t know as a child, but which would have delighted me even more.

I always was a voracious reader, and English was my favorite subject in high school. Still, I didn’t like every poet we had to read, and this made me turn against poetry a little. Then, one day, I opened the anthology we were using and there was “Mr. Tambourine Man,” by Bob Dylan.

Wow. This song first appeared on vinyl in 1965. I would have been reading the lyrics in 1972, when I was studying American literature. Not only was that an amazingly short time for a composition to jump from pop culture to the Western literary canon, but the song had to leap the “generation gap.” In other words, adults had decided to include in a school textbook a song that was popular among young people (hippies!) and written by a long-haired radical. That was unheard of in those days.

My mind, as we would have said back then, was blown. I loved “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Though I first encountered it in The Byrds’ truncated version, I fully appreciated Dylan’s original five-minutes-plus version. I just hadn’t thought of it as poetry.

On closer inspection, there were the elements: “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free/Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands/With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves/Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

Metaphor. Imagery. Structure. Rhythm. Even rhyme—both internal and external (at the end of the line).

This was a powerful moment for me. I appreciated the poetry I read in school on an intellectual level. I experienced music on a visceral level. Now I saw that at least some of the folk and rock music I was listening to was poetry. (Maybe all of it—but some of it was bad poetry.) I began to see poetry everywhere. I began to see songs in poetry. 

You can imagine my delight when I learned Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken” was a poem he set to music.

As an adult, as a school librarian, I’ve had the chance to advance the cause of poetry. I’ve team-taught a poetry unit to middle schoolers. It was fun to re-memorize the first two stanzas of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the whole of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” by Robert Frost. The students seemed to enjoy my recitations, and I talked to them about the pleasures of memorization. We of the modern world spend a lot of time inside our heads or in the virtual reality of social media, video games and movies. Learning a poem by heart takes us outside ourselves, and provides a discipline, a rigor, that we might not otherwise experience.

The Academy of American Poets, the founder of National Poetry Month, created “Poem in Your Pocket Day” in 2008. It will occur on April 26th this year. On this day, we are encouraged to engage in what I think of as “random acts of poetry,” or “guerrilla poetry.”

In the library I supervise at the grades 7-12 school, we will have slips of paper with stanzas of poetry on them. Students can pick a poem, put them in their pockets, and then share them with others at lunch or break time.

This isn’t just for kids. You can post a poem on a water cooler. Or you can share one on social media. Here’s the hashtag: #pocketpoem.

Here’s part of one of my favorite poems, “Song of Myself,” by Walt Whitman.

“Do I contradict myself?/Very well, then I contradict myself,/I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Oh, how those lines spoke to a confused teenage girl. How could they have been written by a man who lived in the 19th century?

They were. They did. And that is the power of poetry.