Lovely evening at a Billy Collins reading at Strand.

On whether or not he’ll ever write prose:

“No.”

…

“No one asks prose writers if they’ll ever write poetry.”

…

“Poetry is a bird, prose is a potato.”

PS – My blog is back up, after a several month struggle/confusion with hosting.

During April, in honor of National Poetry Month, I read 77 Love Sonnets by Garrison Keillor. (Here’s a link to purchase this collection at an Indie Bookstore.) A modern collection of sonnets is, unfortunately, rather hard to come across. I was delighted last year to find out that Garrison Keillor was publishing a collection of his sonnets, and I bought it right away. I had been reading from the collection somewhat sporadically, and decided to read the collection from front to back in April. Many of them are about romantic love, and others are tributes to a variety of other people/things. All of them are lovely.

Here is one of my favorites:

November

How is your bookstore doing? people ask, and I say,
“Holding its own.” And they smile and say, Great.
A bookstore is like an old father. If he has a nice day,
Goes for a walk: fine. It’s enough to perambulate,
No need to run a six-minute mile.
A bookstore is for people who love books and need
To touch them, open them, browse for a while,
And find some common good – that’s why we read.
Readers and writers are two sides of the same gold coin.
You write and I read and in that moment I find
A union more perfect than any club I could join:
The simple intimacy of being one mind.

Here in a book-filled sun-lit room below the street,
Strangers – some living, some dead – are hoping to meet.

April is National Poetry Month in the US. I’ve been trying to read more poetry in general anyway, and this month my goal is to read a poem every day.

There are a few sites I know of that offer a free poem per day, via email:

One is The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, which has a wonderful, free year round daily newsletter that provides “poems, prose, and literary history.” Garrison Keillor also produces a daily podcast where he reads each day’s newsletter. You can listen or sign up for emails on the site, or subscribe through iTunes. Few things in life are more soothing than listening to Garrison Keillor read you a poem and tell you about today’s literary history. I’ve been enjoying this podcast for years, and many of the daily poems I read this month will come from The Writer’s Almanac.

I also discovered that Knopf is offering a free poem a day in April, for National Poetry Month. You can subscribe on their site.

Besides these two newsletters, I will also be reading poems from Billy Collins (I own The Art of Drowning, The Trouble With Poetry, Nine Horses, and Ballistics), and Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems.

Good Poems

The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems

Billy Collins

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Poetry Sunday

“THANKS, ROBERT FROST”
David Ray, from Music of Time: Selected and New Poems

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)

Poetry Sunday

By Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.

(This post was brought over from emilyw.vox.com. Click here for the original post and comments.)