April is National Poetry Month in the United States. The Academy of American Poets started the special celebration ten years ago. National Poetry Month brings together publishers, booksellers, poetry groups, libraries, schools and poets around the country. They celebrate poetry and its important place in American culture.
Thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations take part. They hold readings, celebrations, book displays, educational events and other activities.
This month, the Academy of American Poets will launch the first-ever Poetry Read-a-
Thon. This is for students ages ten to thirteen. The goals of the Read-a-Thon are to
celebrate the reading of poems and writing about poems. Students will choose poems to read and then write about the poems they read.
Poetry is very popular in the United States. America even has a chief poet, known as the Poet Laureate. Robert Pinsky was the Poet Laureate a few years ago. He started the
Favorite Poem Project, to find out which poems Americans liked best. Thousands of
Americans wrote to Mister Pinsky about their favorite poems. He chose two hundred poems by poets from the United States and many other countries.
The poems are included in a book called "Americans' Favorite Poems." It was edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. Along with the poems are comments by some of the people who chose them. We will read five of these poems by American poets.
Our first poem is by Black Elk, a famous spiritual leader of the Oglala
Lakota Native American tribe. He took part in two famous battles against American troops during the late eighteen hundreds. At the end of his life, he told about a number of his tribe's ceremonies and ideas about
life. Among these was the poem called "Everything the Power of the
World does is done in a circle."
FIRST READER:
Everything the Power of the World does
is done in a circle. The sky is round,
and I have heard that the earth is round
like a ball, and so are all the stars.
The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.
Birds make their nests in circles,
For theirs is the same religion as ours.
The sun comes forth and goes down again
in a circle. The moon does the same,
And both are round. Even the seasons
form a great circle in their changing,
and always come back again to where they were.
The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.
Robert Pinsky
Our next poem chosen as one of Americans' favorites is by Rita Dove. She was the
youngest person and the first African-American ever named Poet Laureate of the United States. She served from nineteen ninety-three to nineteen ninety-five.
Rita Dove is a professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Many of her poems are based on the lives of her family, especially her grandparents. Dove often writes about the experience of being a mother, like in this poem, called "Daystar."
She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage to sit out the children's naps. Sometimes there were things to watch -
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.
She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared pouting from the TOP of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour - where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
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