We’re enamored of Poem in Your Pocket Day as an annual National Poetry Month celebration, but if you really want to carry a poem with you, you ought to carry it in your heart. Perhaps you’ve discovered a poem you love in your subscription to our new email sequence, A Month of Poems, 30 poets in 30 days. Or maybe you’ve been swayed by Jim Holt’s description of the pleasures of really knowing poems. Or perhaps you’ve been asking your grandchildren (like the Minnesota grandmother we noticed in 2009) or your students (like Stephen Tollefson at UC Berkeley—see his essay below) to memorize poems because it’s good for them, and now it’s time you committed one to memory yourself. Whatever circumstance has prompted you to want to make a poem your own, we applaud the impulse—and suggest you start with our step-by-step: How To Memorize a Poem. Tollefson’s experience is a reminder—you can do it anywhere. When you’ve done it, come back here and tell us about the first poem you ever memorized.

from The New York Times:
“Got Poetry?” Essay – The Case for Memorizing Poetry, by Jim Holt (2009)
“It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory—doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.... That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure. Between the covers of any decent anthology you have an entire sea to swim in.”

from The San Francisco Chronicle:
“Epic Workout,” Essay on memorizing poetry – at the gym, by Stephen K. Tollefson
“One thing I had forgotten about memorization that’s really a key: You may have the poem firmly in your head, may be able to recite it silently to yourself. But it’s a whole different set of synapses when you say it out loud—you’ve got to speak it to really learn it.”

Walt Whitman was the quintessential American poet who sang of individual freedom, democracy and the brotherhood of man in the many editions of his compendious masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. But like most Americans, he also had to work for a living, and when he lived in Washington, D.C. during and after the Civil War, he worked as a government clerk in the Army Paymaster’s office, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Attorney General’s office. According to The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia, Whitman was fired from the Bureau of Indian Affairs after only 6 months when the newly appointed Secretary of the Interior James Harlan discovered he was the author of the “immoral” Leaves of Grass. So he ended up working in the Attorney General’s office, and it is in the archives of that office that Kenneth Price, University of Nebraska–Lincoln professor and co-editor of The Walt Whitman Archives, discovered several thousand documents written in Whitman’s hand—a great treasure that raises and may also give us answers to questions about the connections between the poet’s work (as in his/her “day job”) and the poet’s work (as in the poems).

from The National Archives:
“National Archives Announces Newly-Identified Papers of Walt Whitman”
“Famous poet’s writings as a Federal employee shed new light on his life and work.... A common thread joins Whitman’s roles during this time: he served as a scribe, drafting letters home for soldiers, drafting reports and correspondence in governmental offices, drafting poetry of the conflict in Drum-Taps, and redrafting Leaves of Grass to take that conflict into account. He gained life experience as a ventriloquist of sorts—throwing his voice to become soldiers themselves as he wrote as and through them to their friends and loved ones, just as he regularly assumed the identity of others as he conducted his work as a government scribe. These experiences of inhabiting another’s view—always part of Whitman’s poetry, of course, but now acted out quite literally in life—accelerated his developing tendency to write from the perspective of various personae.”

from The Guardian (UK):
“Walt Whitman’s working life illuminated,” by Alison Flood
“A ‘huge trove’ of documents written by Walt Whitman while the American poet worked for the government as a clerk has been unearthed by a scholar.... He worked mainly as a scribe and copyist, drafting correspondence, copying letters written by others and researching a variety of issues.... ‘This was an age of high hopes but also big problems, and Walt Whitman was there in the thick of it,’ [Kenneth Price] said. ‘It was when Whitman came to Washington that he began to look for ways to earn a little bit of money, and eventually he got hired as a clerk in government offices. It’s in the records of the attorney general’s offices that I found this huge trove of Whitman documents ̵; we’re close to 3,000 documents now.’”

from The New Yorker:
“Whitman the Scrivener,” by Elissa Lerner
“The documents are mostly copies and drafts that contain insights into such contemporary issues as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the prosecution of the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, and a copyright claim by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” (Lerner also points to letter from Mark Twain to Walt Whitman posted at the “Letters of Note” blog on the same day the National Archives collection was released. This is a must-read, written in 1889 as a celebration of Whitman’s 70th birthday—“What great births you have witnessed!”)

More on Poets and Paid Work:
Poets’ Work, Poets’ Jobs
Readers Respond: How Do We Make a Living?

More on Walt Whitman:
Biographical Profile of the American Bard of Liberation
Library: Selected Poems from Leaves of Grass

One of the best ideas that has taken root in April as part of National Poetry Month is Poem in Your Pocket Day—celebrated this year on Thursday, April 14. It began nine years ago in New York City, and the Academy of American Poets has made Poem in Your Pocket Day a truly national celebration. “The idea is simple: select a poem you love... then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends.”

You could choose a familiar classic nursery rhyme or a poem by Emily Dickinson, since so many of hers are truly pocket-sized... or browse through the library here at About.com Poetry—we have the poems indexed by title and by poet’s name... or click around in AAP’s collection of PDF poems... or copy out a favorite from one of the books on your shelf at home... just don’t leave home without your poem on Thursday, and don’t forget to take it out of your pocket and read it to someone during the day!

Two poets whose fine work has represented our Poetry Forum in previous InterBoard Poetry Competitions have agreed to serve again as our envoys to the April competition: Eric Ashford (aka Sparky DashForth) with his “Dog Prayer” and Tim J. Brennan (68degrees) with his memory poem “My Mother Baked Bread.” Our best wishes to both of them for luck in the judging. And a new judge, Canadian poet Judith Fitzgerald, will begin her three-month term with this month’s group of poems.

Also, we’ve just received word of Kwame Dawes’ choices in the final month of his term as IBPC judge:

March IBPC Winners
• First place: “Best After Frost” by Mandy Pannett, “a wonderfully sensual poem whose tension lies in the pleasure of trying to describe something so physical with word.”
• Second place: “ Two Doves” by Laurie Byro (again!), “lines resonant with insight and feeling that stay with us, force us to review them again and again.”
• Third place: “Middle-Aged Man Photographed In Zion” Bernard Henrie, “a dispatch from the ‘front’—the kind of dispatch that reminds us that the fronts are constantly present in our lives no matter where we live these days.”
• Honorable mention: “Feed the Snake” by Michael Creighton, a poem in which “the curiosity and skepticism of [a] child is addressed by the pragmatism of [a] girl.”

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information page on January-March 2011 judge Kwame Dawes
Background information page on April-June 2011 judge Judith Fitzgerald

In 8th century China, the poet Li Po (aka Li Bai or Li T’ai Po) was both a rebel wanderer and a courtier in the T’ang Dynasty—until he was banished from the Emperor’s court for his irreverent outspokenness. Today he is remembered as the archtype of a wild-man poet (it is rumored that he drowned while drunkenly attempting to embrace the moon’s reflection in the Yangtze), but he is also revered, together with his contemporary Tu Fu, as one of the two greatest of Chinese poets.

It appears that the Chinese rulers’ desire to suppress free speech—especially from those most articulate and powerful speakers: poets, artists and writers—has not diminished in the last 13 centuries. Just this week, we’ve been reading about yet another outspoken artist who was taken away and presumably imprisoned by the Chinese authorities on Sunday—Ai Weiwei, who also happens to be the son of a well-known Chinese poet. This case naturally brings to mind the plight of another prisoner of the Chinese government—last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winning poet Liu Xiaobo. While we’re celebrating National Poetry Month here in North America, let’s spare a thought for the poets around the world who are sitting in prison for speaking their minds, including Saw Wei in Myanmar, Tsering Woeser in China, and many more. (You can read the stories of these and other currently imprisoned writers at the PEN American Center website.)

from The Australian:
“‘Invincible’ China Spooked by Change,” by Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor
“For some time now, the CCP has been puzzling over what to do about the unique artist Ai Weiwei.... Liu Xiaobo, who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, is a considerable figure in a rather more traditional mode, that of the gentleman scholar, thinker and writer. He was jailed 16 months ago for 11 years, for inciting state subversion.... Ai is a one-off: a bear-like, bearded figure with a brilliant mind. I met him three years ago in the extraordinary, vast home-cum-studio he designed on the northern fringe of Beijing. He also helped design the curved steel bird’s nest stadium for the Olympic Games and has staged three exhibitions in Australia in the past five years. It was long thought that he was sheltered from the effects of his own fearlessness, by the widespread respect for his poet father Ai Qing—whom even Premier Wen Jiabao had taken to quoting.”

from The New York Times:
“U.S. Diplomat Sharply Criticizes China on Rights,” by David Barboza
“Using a high-profile annual lecture on Chinese-American relations to make his final public address as ambassador, Mr. Huntsman said bluntly that prominent Chinese activists had been unfairly detained or jailed, naming Liu Xiaobo, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for ‘subversion,’ and Ai Weiwei, the Beijing artist who was taken into custody on Sunday.”

National Poetry Month makes April a particularly good time to make poetry a part of your daily life, and we’ve got a few suggestions for ways to do this. First on our list is a subscription to A Month of Poems, an email sequence of 30 classic poems that everyone ought to know by 30 different great poets from ancient Greece, medieval China, Renaissance England, and 20th century America. You’ll have a new poem in your inbox to start each day, plus selected resources to help you explore the poet’s life, or the poem’s historical context and influence, or its literary form and techniques. And when you’ve discovered your own ways to celebrate poems and poets in April, come on by and share them, please.

More on National Poetry Month:
A Brief History of National Poetry Month
Ways To Celebrate National Poetry Month
Readers Share Their NatPoMo Celebrations

Of American sports, baseball is the certainly the most literary. A baseball game tells a story inside the confines of its form, just as a poem does. Its balls and strikes, hits and outs, runs and innings are very like the echoes and rhymes, stresses and stops, lines and stanzas of a poem. Many, many poets have immortalized their baseball heroes in poems, or used the images and structures of baseball to illuminate their poems. For anyone who is interested in tracing the connections between baseball and poetry in American life, here are a few interesting things we’d recommend reading:

• “Baseball and Verse, from Tinker to Evers to Big Papi” a 2007 article by Levi Stahl from the journal at the Poetry Foundation.
• “Infield Chatter” by Michael Harty, a baseball poem that was selected as a winner in the InterBoard Poetry Competition just last month.
• Whitman McGowan’s cut-up of “Casey at the Bat” and “Kubla Khan”—“Kubla at the Bat.”
• Steve Hermanos’ newly released e-book of poems celebrating the San Francisco Giants’ 2010 championship season, O, Gigantic Victory! Baseball Poems.

Lately it seems as if films about poets and poetry are coming up all over the place—perhaps it’s a flowering of spring, or maybe it’s because we’re coming up on National Poetry Month very soon now. Here are just a few of the movies I’ve run across in the last week or so—none of which I’ve actually seen yet, but I’ve posted links to their trailers so you can sneak a peek and to their websites so that you can find the next screening in your city if you want to see the whole film. Happy viewing!

• Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, a documentary film on the life of poet/short story writer/teacher/activist Grace Paley by Lilly Rivlin—see the trailer on YouTube.
• Poetry, a Korean feature film by Lee Chang-dong about a woman in her 60s who is taking care of her grandson, learning to write poems, and struggling with Alzheimer’s and a secret crime—see the trailer on YouTube.
• I Am Secretly an Important Man, a documentary on Steven Jesse Bernstein—see the trailer on YouTube.
• Louder Than a Bomb, a documentary on four teams competing in the 2008 Chicago-area youth poetry slam—see the trailer on YouTube.
• Big Joy, a film currently in the works celebrating the life of James Broughton—see a sneak peek of the documentary on YouTube.

More Films About Poets:
Angles of a Landscape: Perspectives on Emily Dickinson (2010)
Howl – The Movie – Allen Ginsberg (2010)
John Keats’ Bright Star (2009)
Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2009)
The Source, A Documentary Film of the Beat Generation by Chuck Workman (2008)
A new Poe(try) film: The Death of Poe (2006)
Neruda & Ferlinghetti, Two 20th Century Poetic Icons Captured on Film (2006)
The Business of Fancy Dancing – Sherman Alexie (2002)
Piņero & the Poet’s Life (2002)
Joe Gould’s Secret (2000)

Since 1999, March 21 has been designated World Poetry Day by UNESCO, and this year it’s also the 5th anniversary of Twitter, home of “Twaiku,” the 140-characters-or-less descendant of haiku, and also source of “the longest poem in the world” a pasted-together poem of rhyming public tweets. So the New York Times Week in Review asked four American poets to write new Twitter poems for the day—what do you think, dear readers? Send us your Twitter-length mini-poems in comments below.

Charlie Sheen has been all over the media in the past month, giving interviews in which he says wacky things, getting fired from his television sitcom, drinking “tiger blood”... who would think there was poetry in there? North Carolina poet Ken Taylor, for one—he has just published a cento made from Charlie Sheen quotes at MiPoesias. (Noted with thanks to David Graham, who posted it to the NewPoetry list.) And it turns out that Sheen himself has published a chapbook of his own poems called A Peace of My Mind—you can read excerpts from it at GQ.

More on Cento Poems:
Cento defined, in our Glossary of Poetic Forms
Cento links, to read examples of cento poems online
“SemiCento,” by Bob Holman
Links to other word games and online collaborations