to quote U2: "it's a beautiful day!"

one version of life in the Texas compound

What's in your pocket?

Today is the first annual Poem in Your Pocket Day (no, really), sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. I think they had a NYC-based one last year that I heard about after the fact. The idea is to share your favorite poem with friends, relatives, co-workers, and random strangers today. To find out more, you can go here.

Which brings up an interesting question. If you had only one poem to introduce poetry to someone with, what would you choose, and why? Would you choose a rhyming poem, because that's the easiest way to describe the concept of "poetry"? Would you choose a modern free-verse poem, because that better reflects contemporary poetry? I'm just tossing out questions here, I don't know what I would choose. One of my favorite poems is Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," and that's just not helpful at all.

Which brings up another interesting question. What were your formative poems? What poem or poems made you love poetry? For me, it was the dwarves' songs in Tolkein's The Hobbit, especially this one (I still remember where I was when I read that for the first time), along with Alfred Noyes' romantic "The Highwayman." Maybe I should accost people today and read them some old-fashioned rhymin' goodness.

April 17 poem

animal passions

Two poems today! The first is mine, and the second is a special cameo from the amazing D.

neither taxes nor death

Thanks, Joyce, for telling me how I can lighten the photos! Better, don't you all think?

the thing with feathers

two-fer

And here's a half poem in French that I'm not going to translate because it sounds a lot better in the original!