Hooray! It’s April, and the start of National Poetry Month! I love April for many reasons, like more hours of sunshine, the promising sight of tulips pushing out of the brown earth, and the fabulous Edmonton Poetry Festival. While I adore T.S. Eliot **, I just can’t agree that April is the cruelest month…not when so many poets come together to celebrate words.

Last year I approached the April poem-a-day challenge with gusto, and managed to squeak something out every morning. Some of those poems will always remain the unseen wordblurt of a first draft, but several have become poems I’ve felt confident enough to share at readings, or to include in my manuscript-in-progress. What I really took away from last year was a kind of discipline to write every day, and the realization that there are no wasted words. I also learned so much by reading the work of other poets.

This year I’m trying to use the prompts at both the Poetic Asides poem a day challenge, and the NaPoWriMo prompts posted at This Is Not A Literary Journal.  I’m not sure I’ll manage to write two poems every day, but I’ll see where the ideas from each site take me.

Some days I will post my own poems here, and some days I will post a link to beloved poems by others. Whenever possible, I will try to post links to works by Canadian poets.

So hooray for April, the wordiest month!

Oh, and here’s the quick bit I wrote for today’s Poetic Asides prompt to write a “fool” poem:

daffodils

sheathed in snow

April Fool

** And do click here to read the beautiful poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot