Charm-o-Matic

Enjoying poetry after April makes the mustard sandwich all the more poignant.

PBS shows poetry some love.

Now that all the excitement from National Poetry Month has died down (oh, you didn’t feel that?), I’m going back to a couple of online favorites. You can get a quick hit of that ineffable poetry-i-ness on the PBS site by hearing poets read their work. Try The Lanyard by Billy Collins for starters or The Gate by Marie Howe. These two aren’t frequently decoded and deconstructed by Ph.D. students, but they are admired by academics nonetheless. Their work is free of pretension and finds mystery in ordinary objects such as a lanyard or a cheese and mustard sandwich.

Of course, if you don’t go for new-fangled audio and video, you can find plenty of tidily organized written words on Poets.org. You can even use their U.S. poetry map to get proud about your home state.

Or you could just wait until next April when National Poetry Month rolls around again, but then you’re going to feel like not reading poetry just to spite the calendar. You’re such a rebel.

This entry was posted on May 11, 2009 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Literature, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.