{"id":1131,"date":"2009-04-01T20:32:22","date_gmt":"2009-04-02T03:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/2009\/04\/01\/national-poetry-month-has-begun\/"},"modified":"2009-04-01T21:30:09","modified_gmt":"2009-04-02T04:30:09","slug":"national-poetry-month-has-begun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2009\/04\/01\/national-poetry-month-has-begun\/","title":{"rendered":"National Poetry Month has Begun"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"youtube-video\"><object width=\"425\" height=\"355\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/ns6Ap294MU4\"><\/param><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\"><\/param><embed style=\"float: left; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/ns6Ap294MU4\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" wmode=\"transparent\" width=\"425\" height=\"355\"><\/embed><\/object><\/div>\n<p>It&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/National_Poetry_Month\">National Poetry Month<\/a>!&nbsp; That means that bookstores, publishers and bloggers all over the U.S. and elsewhere are celebrating poetry in all its forms.&nbsp; There&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\/poemADay.php\">poem-a-day series<\/a> that will email you one poem each day for the entire month.&nbsp; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\">Poets.org<\/a> has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\/page.php\/prmID\/318\">instructions for teachers<\/a> trying to motivate students to enjoy poetry in the classroom and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\/page.php\/prmID\/101\">tips for bookstores<\/a> trying to sell poetry.<\/p>\n<p>The video is from W. W. Norton publishers who decided to ask eleven of their published poets what poetry is for.&nbsp; Their answers are incredibly bad, but it&#8217;s a good try.&nbsp; It should be abundantly clear from these poets&#8217; answers that there is very little actual thought going on about what poetry is for.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s my answer:&nbsp; Poetry is for bread.<\/p>\n<p>But here&#8217;s a guy named <a href=\"http:\/\/www.press.uchicago.edu\/Misc\/Chicago\/044106.html\">Charles Bernstein who says that National Poetry Month is a bad thing<\/a>.&nbsp; He says it encourages the most bland of easy-reading poetry available to make people think poetry is safe to read.&nbsp; He&#8217;s right.&nbsp; And so what?&nbsp; So people read some bland crappy poems.&nbsp; That is what most poetry is.&nbsp; That&#8217;s realistic.&nbsp; Perhaps a few of those people will have the energy to go out and find the real, hard, evolving, beautiful and terrifying poetry that would never even stoop to asking, &#8216;What is poetry for?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" src=\"\/\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?x-id=10eafb8e-3ddf-8b21-9290-3fc7357bfc61\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s National Poetry Month!&nbsp; That means that bookstores, publishers and bloggers all over the U.S. and elsewhere are celebrating poetry in all its forms.&nbsp; There&#8217;s a poem-a-day series that will email you one poem each day for the entire month.&nbsp; Poets.org has instructions for teachers trying to motivate students to enjoy poetry in the classroom [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[2482,167,168,2496],"class_list":["post-1131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-literature","tag-poem","tag-poet","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1138,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions\/1138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}