With cherry blossoms in full bloom and vibrant colors found across Ohio University, it’s hard not to tap into one’s artistic side, especially when it comes to poetry. Inspired by Black History Month and Women’s History Month, April serves as National Poetry Month, celebrating the history and significance of poetry.
Established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, the organization has since enlisted an array of government agencies and officials, educational leaders, publishers, sponsors, poets and arts organizations to keep this month going.
Outside of the Academy of American Poets, English students in Athens are also celebrating this month by doing their own reading and writing around campus.
Camryn Mere, a senior studying English and a poetry editor for Sphere Magazine, said the beauty of springtime particularly in April inspires her to write poetry. She said the feeling of the world’s rebirth sparks her creativity.
“It's important to recognize poetry as an art,” Mere said. “How it serves the art community and writing and writers and how people should realize how easy it is to connect with poetry and how it's beneficial.”
Jamie Miller, a junior studying journalism and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, said that even if there’s a lot of stigma around poetry, people should still give it a chance this month.
“I see poetry as a vehicle to get other things accomplished like artistically or social change or creating a community,” Miller said. “For National Poetry Month, I think it's so important for people to give poetry a chance. She's got a bad rep, but she slays so hard.”
Some of the goals of National Poetry Month are to highlight the legacy and ongoing achievements of past and present American poets, as well as encourage the reading and publishing of poems.
Mere said she enjoys reading the work of poets such as Kim Addonizio, Tony Hoagland and Robert Frost. In particular, she likes the themes Addonizio and Hoagland write about.
Mere said she finds Addonizio’s subject matter – romance – relatable, which she enjoys. Hoagland is heavily focused on nature, and the classicality of Frost brings him among the top three for Mere right now.
Sky Johnson, a senior studying creative writing and a poetry editor for Sphere Magazine, said she likes Emily Dickinson because of her courage, as well as her improvements to the genre.
“She (Dickinson) is known for paving the way in obscure concepts and punctuation, so she was one of the first women in the field to really step out,” Johnson said. “Most of her stuff didn’t get published until after she passed (away).”
Dickinson is one of the most well-known female poets of all time, and one the Poetry Foundation dubs “one of America’s greatest and most original.” As Johnson said, her first volume of poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death.
Miller is an avid fan of Audre Lorde, seeing her poetry as accessible and inclusive for all, not work that is pretentious or inaccessible.
“Poetry has this potential to be very pretentious and very inaccessible for people,” Miller said. “I love the way that Audre Lorde talks about her experiences in a way that's really palpable and topics that are not just intangible and exclusively academic.”
Much of Lorde’s work is about her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy. Her 1980 “The Cancer Journals” is regarded as a major work of illness narrative by the Poetry Foundation.
As the president of F-Word Performers on campus, Miller said his favorite poems and poetic performances are ones that channel ideologies into impactful art.
“My most favorite are the ones that are accessible and who channel their ideologies into some sort of art because I feel like you can look at the system and feel so overwhelmed,” Miller said. “I'm a trans guy, and it's really, really easy to look at all the legislation and be like, ‘Damn, this system is really screwed up and it's awful and there's so many things to feel sad about.’”
By using this month as an outlet for expression and connection, as well as outside of it, Miller says you can find beauty in the genre with any work one creates.
“If you can funnel that into a healthy outlet and something that is transformative and something that can also connect with other people, it can be both a pressure valve and a beautiful thing in and of itself that you've created that's not just pent up anger, and yes funnel passion, but also a beautiful thing,” Miller said.
