Yep, it’s that time of the year again—and because the start of National Poetry Month nearly overlaps with Passover this year*, the folks at QuickMuse.com invited Rick Chess and Marge Piercy to draw inspiration from a rabbinical aphorism and improvise a poem in just fifteen minutes. (You can watch the creative process unfold, or just skip straight to the finished verse.) Here’s some more of what the publishing community is doing to celebrate; I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of stuff, so you can fill us in and we’ll mention what we can in the weeks ahead.
⇒Farrar Straus & Giroux is running a month-long blog called “The Best Words in Their Best Order,” which is devoted to “poetry as a spoken art form—meant to be listened to and read aloud—and on the processes that go into making a physical book of poetry.” That would appear to mean plenty of spoken word MP3s, plus some desktop art and screen savers to download as well. “Even,” we’re told, “a ringtone for your cell phone.” I’m kinda hoping that’ll be Ted Hughes‘s “Lineage,” but somehow I doubt it.
⇒Knopf is delivering its Poem-A-Day email newsletter for the ninth consecutive year, and they’ll be throwing in audio clips as well. They’ve also got a selection of e-postcards with poems you can mail to your friends.
⇒The Academy of American Poets calls their daily email Poem-A-Day, too, but they’ve got a wide selection of publishers to draw upon. For that matter, I’ll be putting up a poem at least every weekday at my original blog, Beatrice, from the review copies that have been coming my way. By contrast, a Sunday night perusal of the Poetry Foundation‘s new blog, Harriet, didn’t turn up any specifically celebratory content, but it’s worth reading in its own right (although I wish I could find the RSS feed).
*By the time you read this, I’ll have already left for my family seder, which is why you won’t see me again until tomorrow.