I am delighted to welcome the Bookworms Carnival to my site for a special carnival of POETRY.

As you probably know, Savvy Verse and Wit has been sponsoring a month-long National Poetry blog tour! In addition to the poetry links below, make sure you check out that link for a detailed listing of all the ways that poetry has been honored this month around the blogosphere.

P.S. A Special thanks to Nicole at Linus’s Blanket who did the previous Bookworms Carnival, about out-of-our comfort zone reads. I loved her format and I’m imitating somewhat in this post. Due credit is due!

Nonfiction and Other Resources

Teresa at Shelf Love wrote about The Ode Less Travelled by Steven Fry, a light-hearted look at how to write your own poetry. You’d better go read Teresa’s own poetic creation, thanks to Steven Fry’s lessons. About the book, Teresa says:

The point, says Fry, is to have fun, whatever you choose to wax poetic about. Fry’s goal is to give potential poets familiarity with poetic tools and techniques and some practice using them. And he does so in a way that is both fun and informative (even if it didn’t make me into the next John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins). Read more at Shelf Love

Valerie at Life is a Patchwork Quilt read Wildly Romantic by Catherine M. Andronik, which is about the lives of the English Romantic poets. Valerie writes:

Many of these poets had messy personal lives — drug addiction (mainly to opium), sexual entanglements, children out of wedlock, bouts of poverty.  The author does not shy away from covering these issues; not for salacious reasons, but rather to show that these poets were all too human.  And yet they managed to write poetry that has stayed with us to this day. Read more at Life is a Patchwork Quilt

Monnibo at Monniblog wrote about a number of online poetry links for Canadians, but surely we can all enjoy  Canadian poetry, even from other locales! One thing that really interested me was The League of Canadian Poets:

[It is] a great place for news and author lists. One great feature is that you can sort poets by province of residence. Read more at Monniblog

Teaching Poetry

I wrote about an anthology of poetry for children, with an audio CD of the poets reading their own poetry: Poetry Speaks to Children.

As a mother, I wish this is a book I owned. It is a wonderful way to introduce poetry to children. … Of course, he also likes to read, but the added dimension of sensory experience made this book fun. Read more at Rebecca Reads

Zee from Notes from the North wrote about teaching poetry in the high school classroom, and I wish I sat in her class. She says:

Poetry, I maintain, can be fun, exciting and incredibly informative and entertaining. … You can easily cover everything from sonnets, to epics, to haikus, to humour, to U2 lyrics in just a few weeks of classes. Read some sample poems and more thoughts at Notes from the North

Favorites

A Bookshelf Monstrosity shares some of her favorite lines from her favorite poets. I was struck by her quote from e.e. cummings, because I’ve never read or appreciated much of his, but this is beautiful:

yours is the light by which my spirit’s born:
yours is the darkness of my soul’s return
-you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars
e.e. cummings
Read more at A Bookshelf Monstrosity

Amy Reads shares her one of her favorite poems, “Rain Towards Morning” by Elizabeth Bishop. I think Amy explains well why the poem is so enjoyable!

It always brought to mind Spring and the hope of new love. Every time I read this it makes me happy and hopeful. Read the poem and read more thoughts at Amy Reads

Classic Poetry

Chris at book-a-rama wrote about Robert Burns’ poem, “To a Mouse.” She also embeds a Youtube video of someone reading the poem, rightly insisting you should listen to it! The Scottish accent it just great. Here’s what she says about the poem:

To A Mouse is a poem Burns wrote after he overturned a mouse’s nest with his plow. He has sympathy for this little creature.  Read the poem, listen to the poem, and read more thoughts at book-a-rama

Chris at book-a-rama wrote about Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. She liked it when she was younger, but unfortunately it fell flat fro her this time. I love her attitude aout it though:

Either my heart turned to a hunk of coal or I’ve lived with an engineer too long (How do I love thee? Let me draw up a schematic) but I didn’t find these poems romantic. In fact, they reek of desperation. Read a poem and more thoughts at book-a-rama

Amateur Reader at Wuthering Expectations wrote about Stephen Mallarmé. I’m really intrigued the Mallarmé layout choices; it looks quite bizarre. Amateur Reader includes a few images of the poem “Dice Thrown Will Never Annul Chance.” He writes:

I have seen jazz compositions that look not unlike Mallarmé’s poem. … I think violins followed by brass.  Assuming one reads the words in order.  Mallarmé allows the reader to follow the size of the words, or the spacing; to read across the page, or down it.  The trick, actually, is to try to juggle two or three meanings at a time.  A story emerges – a sea captain, at risk of shipwreck, rolls dice – or doesn’t.  I splash through the jumble of words, or simply look at the stars. Read more at Wuthering Expectations

Modern Poetry

Jeanne at Necromancy Never Pays makes a connection between “Rope” by Alison Hawthorne Deming and her own life as a packrat. She says:

Years from now I expect, we’ll look at some of those things–the wallet and badge, the eyeglasses–and think about this play, and how the strands of our family life were still together, even in the inevitable process of being pulled apart. Read the poem and read more thoughts at Necromancy Never Pays

Nymeth at Things Mean A Lot writes about the collection Red Bird by Mary Oliver. She loved the “Wordsworthian wonder” with which Mary Oliver wrote and I loved this description of her reaction to the poems:

I find that I read poetry much like I listen to music: it’s through repetition that I make it mine. So I’ll read a favourite poem and listen to a favourite song again and again, until I know their every detail and can call them my own. Mary Oliver’s simple language and her vivid, immediate evocation of a particular scene mean that you don’t need to read her poems repeatedly to make sense of them, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be gained by doing so. Read a poem and more thoughts at Things Mean a Lot

Amateur Reader at Wuthering Expectations wrote about Fred Chappell’s volume of poetry, shadow box.  He says that “the poems imitate the title,” and he enjoys the end effect:

They may be the results of experiments.  Now, they’re just poems, good ones.  Chappell had a concept that he turned into real poems.  The concept, once created, is available to everyone. Read a sample poem and more thoughts at Wuthering Expecations

Amanda at The Zen Leaf writes about eleven-year-old Maya Ganesan’s impressive debut collection, Apologies to an Apple. The sample poems are quite impressive! Amanda writes:

Maya Ganesan’s understanding of the world is magnificent. She observes things around her are in a way that reminds me of my own childhood (she turned 11 the week she put the finishing touches on this book). Though I wrote stories and was never any good at poetry, I understand what it is like to pick up little touches of the world around me and have to go write them down. Read some poems and more thoughts at The Zen Leaf

And finally, don’t say poetry that isn’t for you until you read about the modern poetry that Jesse at Literary Escapism recommends. Zombie Haiku by Ryan Mecum tells a story (with illustrations!) of a poet bitten by a zombie in the last days of a “Zombie Apocolpyse.” I have to say, the sample 5-7-5 haiku poems Jesse shares put a new spin on my idea of haiku, and um, what “meals on wheels” really means. Take his own haiku-word for it:

Cover to cover,
zombie book amuses me.
Buy Haiku right now
Read more about Zombie Haiku at Literary Escapism

Happy National Poetry Month! I hope this post has inspired you to keep reading poetry all year long!