I'm on leave from work now, but at school we'd always do "Poem in Your Pocket Day" to celebrate April's status as National Poetry Month. Most of the students ended up shuffling through the motions to get the class credit, but some really presented their favorite poems. Sometimes the poetry would be famous (Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" showed up at least twice in any class), other times obscure, and occasionally it would be the student's own poetry.
I usually tried to choose something on the lighter side. Something that would demonstrate how to read a poem for an audience. Marge Piercy usually worked well. Shakespeare's sonnets, especially some of the more naughty bits, were popular. Langston Hughes reads consistently well. And anything satirical (seen as "in your face") was especially fun for the kids who got it.
Since I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to re-print poems in their entirety, I'm going to attempt to present a poem a day - just a stanza - and provide the link to the rest of the poem. That way, those who wish to read more can do so at a leisurely pace.
If anyone out there wants her/his poetry to be the choice of the day, just email it to me (Spell-check it and line it up, please. I'll print it as I got it.)
So, Happy National Poetry Month!
Here's my first offering. I can print the whole darn thing because I wrote it. Granted, I wrote it in the 5th grade. Then I won a poetry contest with it in the 7th grade. By the way, the prize I chose was Rick Springfield's LP Working Class Dog. Yeah! It was wicked good. The LP, I mean. The poem is pretty ridiculous. Here's my 5th grade poem:
Shadows dark and lonely
Drifting through the night
Quietly, quickly they move
Never a sound they make
In their moonlit passages.
copyright kdw, 1979
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