Celebrating Spring and poetry in April

April, as you know, is:

You may not know that poetry is and has been written by poets in such a wide variety of forms, themes and levels of accessibility that everyone should be able to find poems they enjoy. This judgement is based on having written daily posts for My Minnesota over the past three years and finding a different poem to match each day's theme (with few duplicates). Minnesota is home to many wonderful poets and bookshops friendly to poetry. We'll soon share a list of those we've read and shops we've frequented. Meanwhile, in case you want to start with a broader overview of poems and poets and online resources, here are some options:

• The Poetry Foundation


• Academy of American Poets


• Coursera's upcoming and free MOOC on Modern Poetry


• 60 Poets You Could Be Reading to Celebrate National Poetry Month


• Five Nature Poets


• Minnesota poetry resources and poets

You may even come to enjoy poetry written in prose like this:

Prose Poem ("The morning coffee.")

By Ron Padgett

The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual
of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of
brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the
day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake.
Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of
instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of
coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink
is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's por-
ridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles
and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then,
after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't
understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings
the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his
paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the
room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest
in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the
world.

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