Happy National Poetry Month!

Happy National Poetry Month! Have you written your poem for today yet? I decided to go with one of my prompts from yesterday--writing a poem from the point of view of the pumpkin that gets turned into Cinderella's coach.

Don't forget that all sorts of things are going on in the blogosphere and wider Internet. At the Poetic Asides site, you'll find not only daily prompts, but a contest (go to this posting for details on the contest).

Knopf will send you a poem a day for the month of April. I've discovered some great poets from this service. Go here to sign up.

And if you want a poem sent to you each day throughout the year, along with interesting literary history, go to NPR's The Writer's Almanac. Go here to sign up. Through this service, I've found some great poets and started my day of e-mails being reminded of what's really important to me. Well, at least one of the subject areas that's given great meaning to my life.

Even if you're busy, busy, busy, I'd still encourage all poets to try writing a poem a day for a month. On days that you're busy, you'll discover the joys of the short form, like haiku. You'll develop an awareness that sadly, we don't always have--the awareness comes because you'll always be thinking about the next poem and alert for material that you can use (similar to keeping a regular blog posting schedule). At the end of the month, you're almost guaranteed to have written more poems--even if you fail at writing a poem a day. And some of them will be quite good!

So, join us all as we write a poem a day for the month of April. You don't need to pay any money or get any pledges or do anything requiring extraordinary levels of exertion. You don't need to have a blogsite so that you can post. You don't have to show anyone your poems.

Give it a whirl! What do you have to lose? Just your chains of wrongheaded thinking about what's possible for your poet self (oops, there goes my inner Marxist taking charge of my inner poet--it's not May yet, inner Marxist. Next month we'll sing "Solidarity Forever," I promise! If you're really good, inner Marxist, we'll sing "L'Internationale" too!).