April is National Poetry Month, and today — the one day only special! — is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Just select a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others throughout the day. You can also share your poem selection on Twitter by using the hashtag #pocketpoem.
I’m carrying two poems in my pocket today:
Anne Barngrover‘s “Memory, 1999.” This poem, which appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, is this year’s winner of the Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets. And it is stunning. Anne is the author of two just-released volumes of poetry, Yell Hound Blues (Shipwreckt Books) and co-author of Candy in Our Brains (CutBank), and she is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing-Poetry at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO.
Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come.” It’s my all-time favorite single poem, and appears in it’s entirety in my third novel, The Four Ms. Bradwells, where it is also, coincidentally, my poet character’s favorite poem.
Robert Frost said, in a January 1, 1916 (my birthday! although I wasn’t born yet…) letter to Louis Untermeyer, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
Both the poems I’m carrying in my pocket today are completely complete.
Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day! – Meg
