Poetry in Motion: Part One

Categories: Parenting & Families , Poetry

National Poetry Month is a celebration which has caught on in schools, coffee houses, and public spaces everywhere.  The Main Library will be hosting poetry readings featuring local poets each Wednesday night during April at 7:00 p.m.

For many people, poetry may seem to be an introspective and solitary event - it's not necessarily so!  You too can host a poetry night with friends and family of all ages.  Break out the camcorder and have some fun - here are some sources of inspiration:

Big Talk: Poems for Four Voices and Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices are two award-winning collections by Paul Fleischman which make it easy for groups to read poetry out loud. 

Garrison Keillor's collection, simply titled Good Poems, encompasses a wide range of favorite poetry from the classic to the contemporary, as does his web site, The Writer's Almanac.

The Poetry Break: An Annotated Anthology for Introducing Children to Poetry was written for the classroom but can be easily adapted to other uses. 

Poetry 180 is a web page devised by the smart people at the Library of Congress, who have selected a poem for each day of an (approximate) high school calendar year.

You probably know more poems than you realize - even Twinkle Twinkle Little Star counts as a poem, and you can recite it in tandem with your favorite three-year old. Perhaps you can dig around in the brain enough to recall a poem from school, maybe Casey at the Bat or one of Shakespeare's sonnets?  It's a good exercise for clearing out the cranial cobwebs and for sharing some of our cultural common ground.