POETRY MONTH!

April is poetry month! At the Ravenna location, we are lucky enough to have a few really dedicated poetry aficionados who make it a habit to keep informed about all things going on the poetry world. This year, one of those aficionados, Sinead, has put together a few recommendations. Consider it your very own guide to poetry month. AND a reminder, all poetry is 20% off through the month of April, at both locations!

The Beauty by Jane Hirshfield 
Hirshfield's latest collection (her first since being elected Chancellor of the Acadmey of American Poets in 2012), The Beauty ruminates on the place the body holds in the natural world. Beginning with poems like "My Skeleton," "My Proteins," "My Eyes," the collection goes on to explore mortality, memory, and time, intermingling observations about aging with the poet's own theories on beauty and our moral and societal imperative to remain wholly and entirely ourselves. Hirshfield's work is always a revelation, and this new book only adds to its collective beauty. Buy a copy if you haven't. Buy several.

Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska
Perhaps the most important book of poetry to appear in translation this year. Map brings together almost every poem ever published by Nobel Prize Winner Wislawa Szymborska. Her characteristic wit and candor reminds me of a more elevated Billy Collins, while her interest in rhythm and musicality will makes me wish I could read her in the original Polish. A translator in her own right, Szymborska spent much of her life writing and editing for prominent literary magazines in Poland, and was politically active from the first days of her career. Her death in 2012 was a deep loss for her nation-- and for literature in general. I like to think of her new book as a collection as well as a celebration, and I hope you'll love it as much as I do.

I realize now, having come to the end of the post, that I've only written about books by women, and that if you were to just read this, you would walk away with the impression that there isn't any new or exciting work out there by male poets. Not so! There are some great books coming out by some big names, including The Lunatic by Charles Simic, How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes, and Deep Lane by Mark Doty, not to mention the new John Ashbery, Breezeway, coming May 12th from Ecco Press. A long wait, I know, but you should have plenty of things to read until then. Enjoy!

National Poetry Month

Among other things, like Financial Literacy Month, School Library Month, and my favorite, National Multiple Birth Awareness Month, April is also National Poetry Month.  National Poetry Month was founded by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 as a way to celebrate the impact poetry has had on our society and culture.

In honor of Poetry Month, and this being a bookstore blog and all, check out this great piece on some of the best "book spine poetry" on the internet.  Maybe you should try your own!

At Third Place Books, we celebrate National Poetry Month with 20 percent off all poetry titles for the entire month (both locations).  It's a great time to pick up a few verses from your favorite poet, or maybe try someone new.  Here are a some suggestions:

Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems by James Baldwin

I just read and fell in love with Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, so when this new volume of his poetry came into the store, I snatched it up for my Poetry Month reading.  It's wonderful.

During his lifetime (1924–1987), James Baldwin authored seven novels, as well as several plays and essay collections, which were published to wide-spread praise. These books, among them Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It on the Mountain, brought him well-deserved acclaim as a public intellectual and admiration as a writer. However, Baldwin’s earliest writing was in poetic form, and Baldwin considered himself a poet throughout his lifetime. Nonetheless, his single book of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues, never achieved the popularity of his novels and nonfiction, and is the one and only book to fall out of print. 

This new collection presents James Baldwin the poet, including all nineteen poems from Jimmy’s Blues, as well as all the poems from a limited-edition volume called Gypsy, of which only 325 copies were ever printed and which was in production at the time of his death. Known for his relentless honesty and startlingly prophetic insights on issues of race, gender, class, and poverty, Baldwin is just as enlightening and bold in his poetry as in his famous novels and essays. The poems range from the extended dramatic narratives of “Staggerlee wonders” and “Gypsy” to the lyrical beauty of “Some days,” which has been set to music and interpreted by such acclaimed artists as Audra McDonald. Nikky Finney’s introductory essay reveals the importance, relevance, and rich rewards of these little-known works. Baldwin’s many devotees will find much to celebrate in these pages.

Incarnadine : Poems by Mary Syzbist

Or maybe you might be interested in this year's National Book Award winner for poetry.

The troubadours knew 
how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them. 
 -from “The Troubadours etc.” 

In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist’s formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry’s insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning—for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America’s most ambitious poets.

Calling all Pocket Poets

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,

an elephant, a ponderous house,

A melon strolling two tendrils.

O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

Money's new-minted in this fat purse.

I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

I've eaten a bag of green apples,

Boarded the train there's no getting off.

-Sylvia Plath, from Poem in Your Pocket For Young Kids (Amulet)

Hey Kids! It's National Poetry month! Submit your original poetry and we'll post it on our blog and in our store. Entry forms are located in our children's department. For more information, click here.

Poem In Your Pocket Contest: April 1

The Panther

The Panther is like a leopard,

Except it hasn't been Peppered.

Should you behold a panther crouch, 

prepare to say Ouch.

Better yet, if called by a panther,

Don't anther.

-Ogden Nash, from Poem in Your Pocket For Young Kids (Amulet)

Hey Kids! It's National Poetry month! Submit your original poetry and we'll post it on our blog and in our store. For more information, click here.

Children's Poem In You Pocket Poetry Contest

You Travel a Path on Paper 

You travel a path on paper

and discover you're in a city

you only thought about before.

It's a Sunday marketplace. Parakeets and finches

are placed on the stones

and poppies in transparent wrapping

 

How can you be where you never were? 

And how did you find the way -- with your mind

your only measure?

-Fanny Howe, from Poem in Your Pocket For Young Kids (Amulet)

Are you a poet and nobody knows it?

Our children’s department is having a poetry contest open to kids grade K - 12. In celebration of National Poetry Month, every day during April we will select one poem to post on the blog and in our children’s department. 

Here's how to enter!

1. Stop by the children’s department to pick up your “pocket” to write your poem on. You can write it yourself or ask your parents for help. 
2. Drop your poem in our drop box on the desk in the children's department 
3. Check the blog every day in April to see if your poem is the poem of the day!

On the last day we will post the remaining submissions. So EVERYONE who enters has a chance to see their poem in print! We will also have a raffle at the end of the month to win a copy of 

Poem In Your Pocket For Young Poets: 100 Poems to Rip Out and Read  (Amulet)

Published in conjunction with The Academy of American Poets

selected by Bruno Navasky

And don't forget! All POETRY BOOKS are 20% off during April!