Poets.org has ramped up the poems, with April apparently spilling into May with these pieces:

WHERE?
by Kenneth Patchen

There's a place the man always say
Come in here, child
No cause you should weep
Wolf never catch the rabbit
Golden hair never turn white with grief
Come in here, child
No cause you should moan
Brother never hurt his brother
Nobody here ever wander without a home
There must be some such place somewhere
But I never heard of it


According to Patchen's bio, a chronic spinal problem left him in almost constant pain for thirty years. Until some poet friends raised funds for an operation. It was a success, & Patchen enjoyed a brief respite -- until a follow-up surgery went wrong, & left him bedridden for the rest of his life.

During which "he created his most visually remarkable works".

Now read that poem again...

And then read this one:

May Day
by Phillis Levin

I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

[read the rest...]

"I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive"
-- Gregory Orr

I know it's about, what, half way through April already (& I have been busy settling into a new job), but of course April is poem-a-day month at poets.org -- one of my favourite times of year. Not just for the poems that arrive in my inbox daily, but for the way it gently ignites the curiosity, causing the casual reader to click over to poets.org to learn such things as:

The term "anaphora" comes from the Greek for "a carrying up or back," and refers to a type of parallelism created when successive phrases or lines begin with the same words, often resembling a litany. The repetition can be as simple as a single word or as long as an entire phrase. As one of the world’s oldest poetic techniques, anaphora is used in much of the world’s religious and devotional poetry, including numerous Biblical Psalms.

To demonstrate, an excerpt from an anaphoric poem (one I've never actually been able to read in one sitting -- perhaps because I am frequently too sober):

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
( who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz )

Just as people never tell new parents their babies are ugly (even if they are), you shouldn't ever tell someone who just read you a poem that you'd rather not have heard it, and can you have that portion of your life back, please?

Many years ago, while learning to be an adult ed trainer (yes, settle back kiddies, it's an old-person story), I came across the 'sandwich' approach to criticism. This is a means to framing whatever negative or 'constructive' feedback you have between two pieces of positive feedback.

Positve, negative, positive.

'I like the imagery,' you say, 'although the lead character didn't strike me as sympathetic. Cool name, though!'

I've continued to stick with this method of critique EVEN WHEN the slices of bread I've had to work with have been very thin indeed.

And I have never, ever admitted to a parent that their baby is ugly. I have, however, commented sarcastically that 'gee, it's amazing how very different and not-at-all-the-same babies are, eh? It's human, right*?'

------
* I haven't really ever done that. Parents are fierce when roused and, like bad poets, should be approached only with great caution.

April is National Poetry Month ... in the US. But the good news is you can join in wherever you are, provided you have email.

Poets.org is doing their annual 'poem a day' email.

While you're there signing up for a poem a day, check out the Life Lines page, where you'll find words like these:

then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

— from "Guilty of Dust" by Frank Bidart

Except that I wasn’t accustomed to being direct about the more personal aspects of my life, the way other poets seemed to be of their own. To overcome this, I found myself often codifying my intention, disguising it in allegory or burying it beneath layers of extrapolated imagery so that the poem reads one way but, if the code is known, tells another story altogether.
-- Frieda Hughes

ocvictor discusses the differences between poetry and prose:

The first -- and this is a personal standard, mind -- is that the role of fiction is to show the course of change, whereas poetry's job is to show the moment of change. [snip]

In poetry, it is less important (and indeed, usually counterproductive) to look so much at the why of change, or how the change came to occur, than it is to look at the exact moment of the change. This is why Billy Collins is so appealing: Because he's mastered the art of capturing that small epiphany. And the moment can be complex -- see Eliot's "The Wasteland" -- but fundamentally, we're still looking at one moment there, at the reduction of what's left when the story's been boiled away and left to its raw, emotional elements.

Before you know what kindness really is
You must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment
Like salt in weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
What you counted and carefully saved.
All this must go before you know
How desolate the landscape can be
Between the regions of kindness
-- Naomi Shehab Nye, Kindness