POETRY MONDAY: April 4, 2011
Since this is National Poetry Month, we are doing something slightly different from our usual Poetry Monday. Instead of featuring new poems, we invite you to scroll back through our archives to the very beginning of this series and then up to our most recent pages. Browse through what’s there, and then take some kind of action. Go to a local bookstore, hold some poetry books in your hands, look through them, and buy one or more for your own library. This month, there are readings and signings everywhere. Go to one – do – and participate in the discussion afterward. Your attendance and input will be very much appreciated. Poets need readers and listeners.
Among the books I hope you will look for are three real stand-outs that have given me so much pleasure that I want to call them to your attention. The first is Maxine Kumin’s Still to Mow (W.W. Norton & Co.) This is worth another look, even though she has since published another of her many wonderful collections.. The second is Alicia Ostriker’s The Book of Seventy, (University of Pittsburgh Press), whose poems in the current issue of Poetry include three characters you may have met in some of her earlier poems: the old woman, the tulip, and the dog. The third is Jeff Friedman’s latest collection, Working in Flour, (Carnegie Mellon University Press) which continues his sequence of touching and funny family poems and also some with biblical themes. You might also, while you’re thinking about poetry, look for my own third collection (she says modestly), Those Flames, (Bay Oak Publishers).
All of the above poets have been featured in past issues of Poetry Monday. Full disclosure: all have been my own mentors, but for a reason. I chose to study with them because I admired their work and their approach.
So, to all of you who have been reading Poetry Monday and to those who are reading it for the very first time, Happy Poetry Month! Perhaps you will even be so good as to share some comments about your poetry explorations.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor