Extending National Poetry Month

If April is the cruelest month, April 15 is certainly the year’s lowest point: it’s the last day to mail tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service.

Yet even the tardiest of taxpayers can be offered some solace. April is National Poetry Month, which has a Tax Day campaign to distribute thousands of copies of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for free at post offices nationwide. You have to wonder if the books are tax-deductible, but you can also take some pleasure in the fact that, in the midst of the wealth redistribution firestorm, National Poetry Month’s Web page comments on the “continuing debate about whether this [The Waste Land] is a poem of despair or of salvation.” (The site offers no opinion.)

Regardless of its views on taxation, National Poetry Month is a favorite of librarians, teachers, and literature aficionados nationwide. Started in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, NPM is one of the cutest and coolest extended literary to-dos to grace New York City, with events ranging from the April 1st kick-off gala, “Poetry and the Creative Mind,” to the charmingly down-home closing event, April 30th Poem in Your Pocket Day. For a sense of how broad this range is, keep in mind that the former was held at Lincoln Center’s recently revamped Alice Tully Hall, was headlined by Joan Baez, Zadie Smith, and Columbia’s own Mark Strand, among others, and boasted $450 VIP tickets, whereas the latter simply encourages participants to carry a favorite poem around all day and share it with whomever they meet.

Poem in Your Pocket Day was inspired by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers’ delightfully sweet “Keep a Poem in Your Pocket” (“Keep a poem in your pocket / And a picture in your head / And you’ll never feel lonely / At night when you’re in bed”), but even the humblest of NPM’s events have elements of sophistication. In the past, The New York Times has printed poems the week before PIYP Day for pocketing purposes, and this year’s partners include the New York Public Library. This melding of the highbrow and reputable with the aggressively accessible is typical of NPM, which aims to increase philanthropic support of poetry (a project best aimed at members of a higher tax bracket) at the same time that it works to introduce the average American to a poem, any poem.

This “national celebration,” as National Poetry Month calls itself, is both joyful and a bit melancholy. Poetry is one of the oldest and most venerated artistic traditions in history. It has been used to educate, to entertain, and simply to revel in the aesthetic potentials of language. Although it’s lovely to have a month devoted to its appreciation, it’s a shame that such a month is deemed necessary. Shouldn’t such a respected medium be valued year-round? Come May, do booksellers relegate unsold volumes to a dusty back-room shelf once more, as the state of poetry generally declines?

NPM acknowledges this concern: the sixth of its frequently asked questions reads, bluntly, “Shouldn’t we celebrate poetry all year round, not just in April?” “By all means, yes!” the answer begins, and it’s true that the Academy of American Poets sponsors many other programs. But the year-round options offered (the most prominent of which is joining the Academy) seem geared only toward the serious poet or poetry reader. The person that National Poetry Month claims to target—the otherwise uninitiated citizen—is unlikely to take such a step.

It’s a conundrum with no easy solution, but the best option is using the impetus of April to move books and integrate poetry into education, and National Poetry Month’s commitment to these endeavors is impressive. The Academy not only offers free poetry lesson plans, curriculum units, and tip sheets to teachers, but also gives display and promotional advice to librarians and booksellers. The hope is that even a month of dedicated teaching and selling is enough to instill a lasting love for poetry in impressionable students, and to install a volume or two of sonnets on more American shelves. It may well help (in the past, booksellers across the nation have reported a spike in poetry sales every April), and it certainly can’t hurt.

Rebecca Evans is a Columbia College junior majoring in English and creative writing. One For the Books runs alternate Fridays.