April is National Poetry Month, which was first introduced by the Academy American Poets in 1996. In that year, President Bill Clinton, in his presidential proclamation praised National Poetry Month saying that it “offers us a welcome opportunity to celebrate not only the unsurpassed body of literature produced by our poets in the past, but also the vitality and diversity of voices reflected in the works of today’s American poetry” (1).
Of course, the association of poetry and the month of April goes back much farther than 1996, and it is certainly more than just an American tradition. For example, in 1845, while visiting Italy, British poet Robert Browning began his great poem Home Thoughts From Abroad as follows:
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
In addition to springtime, one of the favorite topics of poets is poetry itself. As you might guess, they don’t give dry dictionary definitions:
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language. -Peter Porter
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. -Robert Frost
Today’s Challenge: Quench Your Thirst for Verse
What are 50 words that come time mind that you associate with the word “poetry”? Brainstorm a long list of words or phrases that come to your mind when you think of the word “poetry.” Write down anything that comes to mind: poetic terms, memorable poetic lines, great poems, favorite poets, or just words that you think are especially poetic.
On this the 26th day of the month we are reminded of the 26 letters of the alphabet — the letters we use to write and to read poetry. Imagine you were to create a poetry ABC book, featuring your 26 poetry-related words, names, or phrases. The only stipulation is that you must cover all 26 letters of the alphabet, and you must be able to explain how each of the items on your list is poetry-related.
To help prime your poetic pump of ideas, here is a list of poetry-related terms from Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary:
alliteration, ballad, couplet, double dactyl, enjambment, found poem, genre, haiku, iambic pentameter, juxtaposition, kenning, lipogram, metonymy, narrative poetry, onomatopoeia, persona, quatrain, rhyme scheme, sonnet, tone, understatement, villanelle, wit, xerox poetry, ya-du, zeugma (2)
(Common Core Writing Language)
Quotation of the Day: Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. -Robert Frost
2-Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
The duo, made up of singer-songwriter Paul Simon and vocalist Art Garfunkel, met as children in Queens, New York. Simon and Garfunkel were the most successful duo in popular music in the 1960s and were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
To commemorate the deliverance of Romulus and Remus each year, priests gathered at Palatine Hill above Rome to sacrifice goats and a puppy along with making an offering of grain. Two young boys were then stripped naked and clothed in the freshly skinned coats of the sacrificed goats. In addition to the goatskins, the boys were also given a narrow strip (or thong) cut from the hide of the goats. These thongs were called 
In his 1890 lecture, Butler addressed age-old questions about the evolution of human language and whether or not language and reason are exclusive to the human species, as opposed to other animals. In the course of his discussion of language, he presented a metaphorical definition of the word 
Often a prescription for good writing is to “show, don’t tell.” This is great advice, and the three-word maxim is an excellent example of concise writing; however, the irony of “show, don’t tell” is that the statement itself does more telling than showing. For a better, more illustrative version of this advice we can turn to a quotation that’s often attributed to Chekhov:
The show included a nod to the classics. In Bruce Wayne’s private study, on a desk next to his red Batphone, sat a bust of William Shakespeare. The bust was a vital prop, for beneath the hinged head of the Bard was a hidden button. When Wayne pushed the button, a sliding bookcase opened revealing two Batpoles, giving Batman and Robin immediate access to the Batcave. 
Speaking of parts of speech, the story of the creation of 
Published in his 1957 book 
So instead of beginning with the letters of already-existing words and phrases and making them into a word, as in the acronym RADAR (“Radio Detection and Ranging”), bacronyms begin with a word and creates a phrase to match the word’s letters. For example, the bacronym AMBER from the AMBER alert system was named for Amber Hagerman, who was abducted in Texas in 1996. The official translation for AMBER was invented to fit the name: “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response.”