I'm sorry I was late.
I was on my way
when I felt a plot
thickening in my arm.
I have a fear of heights.
Luckily the Earth
is on the second floor
of the universe.
-- Jeffrey McDaniel, (excerpt) 'Compulsively Allergic to the Truth', from The Endarkenment, via poets.org Poem-A-Day

"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 )

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