National Poetry Month is just a few weeks away. While you wait for the celebration to begin, you might want to get some great titles and tools onto your list (or your laptop).
Check out these ten terrific recommendations, and try your hand at everything from new writing challenges to new reading experiences. Or, if you’re a teacher, add these resources to tutor yourself or your students.
1. How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem “Introduction to Poetry,” by Tania Runyan
One of the biggest barriers to reading poetry is a feeling that it’s too hard to understand. On top of that, many of us learned that a poem was something to be tortured for every ounce of tone and figurative language it might yield, generally for the purposes of finding the “right answers” about or the “true meanings” of poems.
Billy Collins’s humorous poem “Introduction to Poetry” plays with these sometimes unpleasant approaches to reading poems. Tania Runyan’s book then plays with “Introduction to Poetry,” to bring us more satisfying ways of interacting with poems.
While the book can be used to teach someone how to read a poem, it is also a beautiful invitation to step inside of poems for the pure pleasure of it. Perfect for National Poetry Month, which tries to cultivate a love of poetry. Delightful anthology included.
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