Time to celebrate: Easter, April Fools Day, beginning National Poetry Month

If today's title causes you to ask yourself the question: "which of these things is not like the others?"–the answer is "Yes!" Contrarians might argue that only April fools celebrate either Resurrection or Poetry. Of course, those contrarians would be woefully wrong. In our own contrary way, we're responding to wind chills in the single digits, and the snow-covered grounds hindering explorations for skunk cabbage and/or pasque flowers (you know, named for Easter and Passover). Here's how we hope to rise to early April's cruel joke:

skunk cabbage not snow-covered

Photo by J. Harrington

Several years ago, a poet by the name of Tony Hoagland wrote an essay about Twenty Poems That Could Save America. It subsequently morphed into the title of a book of his essays. We believe that America needs saving, even more so than when the essay was first written. We also believe that what America is supposed to stand for is definitely worth saving and we agree that poetry can make a major contribution to saving what America was intended to become. During National Poetry Month, we want to explore, inter alia, Hoagland's list of twenty poems and what they offer by way of saving grace. Hoagland organizes most of his thoughts under the following themes in his essay:

• Poetry Teaches the Ethical Nature of Choice


• Poetry Respects Solitude and Self-Discovery


• Poetry Stimulates Daring


• Poetry Rehabilitates Language


• Poetry Defuses Sexual Anxiety and Encourages Curiosity


• Poems Acknowledge Trouble Ahead


• Poems Rehearse the Future


• Poems Teach Aesthetics That Are of Broad Application

pasque flower not covered in snow

Photo by J. Harrington

Following this paragraph is a list of Hoagland's Twenty Poems, with links, where we could find them, to each poem and its  poet. We may, or may not, post about these poems in the order they're listed. Since this is as much to help us learn as it it to share with you (the best way to learn a topic is to teach it), there will be no quiz at the end. The only homework is to read each poem and think about what it means to you. We also reserve the right to sneak in other poems and/or poets during the month, without forewarning. Remember, one of our favorite things about poets and poems is that Plato banned poets and poetry from his ideal republic, while Shelley, in A Defense of Poetry, remarks that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world...." Again, the proper response is "Yes!"

Poem	Poet
Twenty-First. Night. Monday	Anna Akhmatova
God’s Justice	Anne Carson
memory	Lucille Clifton
A Man and a Woman	Alan Feldman
America	Allen Ginsberg
Bamboo and a Bird	Linda Gregg
A Sick Child	Randall Jarrell
Black People & White People Were Said	Kerry Johannsen
Topography	Sharon Olds
Wild Geese	Mary Oliver
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car	Dan Pagis
Merengue	Mary Ruefle
Ballad of Orange and Grape	Muriel Rukeyser
Waiting for Icarus	Muriel Rukeyser
American Classic	Louis Simpson
The Geraniums	Genevieve Taggard
Song of Speaks-Fluently	Speaks-Fluently
Traveling Through The Dark	William Stafford
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer	Walt Whitman
Our Dust	C. D. Wright

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