Do you Haiku?



http://nerudacats.tumblr.com/ “The poetry of Pablo Neruda as read by cats.”
Kind of the greatest thing ever.  Duh.

After being TOTALLY BLOWN AWAY by the young poets performing their work at the Spoken Ink program at Main library on Friday night, I was inspired to post a little something about poetry.  (Alas, I am no poet so seek your rhyme and meter elsewhere. Like here.)

April, as you are probably aware by now, is National Poetry Month. How are you celebrating?  Do you haiku?

I wanted to blog

entirely in haiku

but it’s really hard

A google search for “haiku generator” netted quite a few results.  (It would seem the internet has a lot of time on its hands.)  This one at everypoet.com seemed particularly full of itself and I had a good giggle over the computer-generated haikus.  However my favorite has been this Tumblr of serendipitous haiku found in articles in the New York Times. For example:

“As dawn broke we warmed/ strawberry pop-tarts over/ the dying embers.”  Evocative, no?

Edgar Allan Poe's Richmond:
The Raven in the River City

Richmond (and Boston, and Baltimore...) native Edgar Allen Poe was quite the poet.  How about paying a visit to the Edgar Allen Poe museum and following them on Twitter?

Thrall: Poems

How about checking out some contemporary US poets from the library? The current poet laureate of the United States is Natasha Trethewey.  The Poet Laureate is announced each year by the Librarian of Congress.  Read more about it at the Library of Congress website: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/about_laureate.html



And finally, a poem by Nikki Giovanni, a Virginia poet who also happens to hail from my hometown of Cincinnati, included here for a little library love:

My First Memory (of Librarians)

Bicycles: Love Poems

This is my first memory:

A big room with heavy wooden tables that sat on a creaky

wood floor

A line of green shades—bankers’ lights—down the center

Heavy oak chairs that were too low or maybe I was simply

too short

For me to sit in and read

So my first book was always big

In the foyer up four steps a semi-circle desk presided

To the left side the card catalogue

On the right newspapers draped over what looked like

a quilt rack

Magazines face out from the wall

The welcoming smile of my librarian

The anticipation in my heart

All those books—another world—just waiting

At my fingertips.