National Poetry Month

The library is closed all day today for our annual staff in-service.  But I still have a pre-scheduled post.

Besides being tax day, today is also the halfway point of National Poetry Month.  I wanted to share a couple of interesting poetry related links.

First, as I was perusing the NPR Books coverage last week, I came upon this:

Help us make poetry!

April is National Poetry Month: 30 days set aside for the celebration of all things verse. Many of us here at Code Switch love poetry every month of the year, but we can't always make space for it in our coverage.

So this month, we're taking advantage of the national celebration and highlighting great poets and poems that address issues of race, ethnicity and culture.

To kick off our coverage, we're inviting you to help us create collaborative poetry on Twitter. We've invited poet Kima Jones to curate a crowd-sourced poem on the subject of race and identity. (Keep your eyes peeled for a profile of Jones tomorrow.)

This Wednesday, April 9 at 12 p.m. EST, join us on Twitter and tweet out the line you'd like to see added to the poem. Use the hashtag #CSPoetry so we can see your submission.

We'll share the final product, a co-creation of Code Switch readers and Kima Jones, and have a conversation about race, culture, poetry and creativity.

 Click here to see the poem they made.

What I took away from this community built poem was 2 things.

1. What a great tool Twitter is for crafting poetry.  In fact, I did a bit more digging and found this link from Book Riot of 12 Twitter Accounts for Poetry Lovers to Follow.  Twitter and poetry really do fit hand in hand very nicely.
2. Libraries could easily do something like this on Twitter or Facebook or even on a chalkboard at the library. In fact, I am going to pass this idea on to a few people here at the BPL to see if we can have our own community sourced poem.

If you have some interesting or useful National Poetry Month links or ideas to pass on, please leave a comment.