National Poetry Month 2019

April is National Poetry Month and there’s no time like the present to update this blog!

I love National Poetry Month—it challenges me to read more poetry and to write more as well. I haven’t written anything but prose (like these Huffington Post pieces here and here) in a long while, and this month, I plan to attempt NaPoWriMo (where I’ll write one new poem/draft each day of the month). This is such a daunting task, but I’m up for it and I sincerely hope it will kickstart my poetry writing, again!

Of course, I always find inspiration in reading poetry. This month, I’m reading: Good Bones by Maggie Smith, American Primitive by Mary Oliver, If You Have to Go by Katie Ford, and a selection of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

My focus for this National Poetry Month will be ekphrastic poetry, which is an absolute love of mine. In fact, I’m working on an article about contemporary ekphrastic poetry for Superstition Review right now (due out on April 11). Expect quite a bit of ekphrastic poetry from my NaPoWriMo 2019 on this blog!

In fact, here’s one I just finished tinkering with to start off National Poetry Month based in this painting by Vasu Tolia:

 

[My Mother Packing Her Wedding Dress]

 

Note: I’m only leaving poems up for about a week, so I can edit and submit them later.

 

How are you celebrating the month? What will you be reading? Are you participating in NaPoWriPo? I’d love to know!

If you’re interested in adding my books to your National Poetry Month reading list, you can get them here and here!