National Poetry Month/Poem In Your Pocket Day

April is National Poetry Month, and April 26 is Poem In Your Pocket Day.

The idea is to carry a copy of your favorite poem in your pocket to share with others in a sort of awareness, appreciation, promotion exercise.


There are two books available to help you along:  Poem in your Pocket for Young Poets and Poem in Your Pocket. 

Each contains poems that can be torn out of the book and put into your pocket or the pocket of one of your friends.

Great idea, don't you think?


Here's how it works:

My all time favorite poem is:

 "Mending Wall"

by Robert Frost. 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

What's yours?

For more ideas about how to participate in National Poetry Month, go to Poets.org or Napa Valley Writer's Conference page.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

Poem in Your Pocket Day

Did you know that April 14 is National Poem in Your Pocket Day?

I didn't, until I read an article in The Sacramento Bee about how Yolo County residents plan to celebrate the day.

The idea behind Poem in Your Pocket Day is simple.  You are to select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then, on this day, carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends.

Throughout the day, poems from pockets are unfolded with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores.

In Yolo County, for instance, Allegra Silberstein, the city of Davis' poet laureate, will lead a poetry reading at the Branch Library, where people  can pick up pocket-sized poems, as well as write and finish poems that have been started with a first line.

What a great idea!

In keeping with National Poetry Month, here's a favorite poem of mine.

          The Road Not Taken

               Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
               And sorry I could not travel both
               And be one traveler, long I stood
               And looked down one as far as I could
               To where it bent in the undergrowth;

               Then took the other, as just as fair,
               And having perhaps the better claim
               Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
               Though as for that the passing there
               Had worn them really about the same,

               And both that morning equally lay
               In leaves no step had trodden black.
               Oh, I marked the first for another day!
               Yet knowing how way leads on to way
                I doubted if I should ever come back.

                I shall be telling this with a sigh
                Somewhere ages and ages hence:
                Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
                I took the one less traveled by,
                And that has made all the difference.

                                                                       --Robert Frost


What's yours?