April 17, 2013 - Poetry and the Creative Mind Day

April is National Poetry Month in the U.S., and tonight various Hollywood stars, artists, scholars, and poets will get together to celebrate poetry and raise money to sponsor poets and the publication of poetry.


Read about this event at the official website.

To celebrate poetry in your own neck of the woods, read your favorite poems, write poems, and browse the internet for more poems to enjoy.






Here are some links to get you started:

Shel Silverstein writes always-popular humorous verse! (Another Silverstein site here.) 

Jack Prelutsky also writes humorous poems. 

I love this poem:

The Horses
by Ted Hughes

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird -
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline - blackening dregs of the brightening grey -
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey - ten together -
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,


With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments
Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging -
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays -

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Here are some earlier posts about poetry and poets:











Also on this date:











No comments:

Post a Comment