Poetry And The Creative Mind Day

What the day is

Poetry and the Creative Mind Day is observed on April 1. It takes its name from an annual event run by the Academy of American Poets, in which people who are not poets by trade read poems that matter to them, and it marks the start of National Poetry Month.

Origin and background

The premise of that event is worth stating plainly, because it is the useful idea in the day: poetry is not the property of poets. The readers are actors, scientists, musicians and public figures reading other people's work, and the point is that a poem belongs to whoever is reading it.

If you want to read poetry with more confidence, the place to start is the line break, which is the only device prose does not have. A line ending is an instruction about timing: it creates a small pause whether or not any punctuation is there. When a sentence runs past the end of a line, the reader is held for an instant on a phrase that briefly looks complete, and then the next line revises it. That doubled meaning is deliberate and it is most of what a poet is doing when deciding where to break.

Meter works on the body rather than the mind. A regular rhythm is felt physically, close to a pulse or a walking pace, and the moments where a poet departs from the pattern are where the emphasis lands, which is why a metrical poem read aloud communicates something a silent reading flattens.

There is also a practical reason poetry sounds the way it does. Rhythm and rhyme constrain which words can fill a slot, so a remembered line resists corruption in a way prose does not, and poetry carried across generations before writing was widespread because it was the most reliable format available.

Reading aloud is not optional for this. Most of what a poem does is inaudible on the page.

How to take part

• Read one poem aloud, slowly, and again straight afterward.
• Pause at line endings even where there is no punctuation.
• Choose a poem somebody else recommended rather than a famous one.
• Memorize four lines. It is easier than it sounds and it stays with you.
• Sign up for one of the poem-a-day mailings that run through April.