Poetry

APRIL IS POETRY MONTH
APRIL IS JAZZ APPRECIATION MONTH

April is Jazz Appreciation Month
What does bebop sound like? How did jazz evolve? Learn about Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and others. See ideas for celebrating jazz appreciation month and for studying jazz in U.S. history or music class. 5th annual Philadelphia Jazz Appreciation Month

Who Likes Jazz? Probably not you!

1899 formed in the United States. Ragtime Jazz is American Music - descending from a jig then the left hand steady pace while the right hand plays with those choppy rhythmic ragged movements.

The Sanas of Teason and the Sanas of Ráig to Rag to Ragged to Ragtime to JAZZ

Irish American Vernacular English words used by Scoop Gleeson in the Sports pages to talk about baseball.

Find out what Scoop Gleeson meant- when he said: 'Its members have trained on ragtime and `jazz'.'

POETRY

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. ~ Lord Acton

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.
When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence.
When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. ~ John F. Kennedy

Music and Reading Connections of Poetry
Poetry is Speech and Rhythm, which are the
two elements of language development.

Library of Congress
Poet Laureate

Library' of Congress website for Poetry

Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry

New Laureate Looks Deep Into Memory June 6, 2012
The Library of Congress is to announce Thursday that the next poet laureate is Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three collections and a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Ms. Trethewey, 46, was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.

PHILIP LEVINE was born in Detroit in 1928, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, and educated at Wayne University (now Wayne State), the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Stanford University. He is the author of twenty collections of poetry, and his honors include the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and two National Book Critic Circle Awards.

Poetry Contests, the National Library of Poetry, and Amateur Poetry Anthologies

Poetry Competition on Youtube 2013
for folks aged 18 to 35, with the winner invited to the 2014 Gathering, the 30th, which is looking at the future of the tradition.

A Poem Store Open For Business, In The Open Air
Zach Houston makes a living on San Francisco's streets by composing poems on a manual typewriter. We asked some NPR personalities to tell us what poems they might recite to a friend.
Ode To Poetry Month: A Match Game
We asked some NPR personalities to tell us what poems they might recite to a friend.
"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," Howe says.
Poet Marie Howe Reflects On The 'Living' After Loss"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," Howe says.

19/11 Swedish poet Transtromer wins Nobel in literature
msnbc.msn.com

• Tomas Transtromer poets.org/
  Tomas Transtromer: Poetry tomastranstromer.net/
  

8/2011

Philip Levine Poet Laureate an American Institution
at 83 years old - was named the nation's next poet laureate has spent much of his career listening and reflecting on the voices of America. Politics, particularly issues of class, thread through his poetry. Informed by his personal experience working in factories. "He's traditionally been one of the humanitarian voices, the voice of social and political justice in American poetry," St. John said. In addition to work and working people, St. John says that Levine is a poet of "the natural world, as well as the industrial world." Levine's poetry focuses on the moments and textures of the day-to-day life of the working class. Poetry connects, when the reader can say, Uh-huh, I know what that is about.

"I want to bring poetry to people who have no idea how relevant poetry is to their lives," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Fresno, where he is a professor emeritus at Cal State Fresno while continuing to write poetry.

Honors include over a 60-year-writing career
- the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 2 Guggenheim Foundation fellowships and 3 fellowships from the NEA.
The U.S. poet laureate is selected by the librarian of Congress in Washington, D.C. The duties and responsibilities of the poet laureate, who receives a $35,000 stipend, are largely ceremonial, but a poet who wishes to can undertake any projects he or she likes during his tenure. His yearlong term begins in October.
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"What Work Is" Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is — if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants....

Library Days
I would sit for hours with the sunlight
streaming in the high windows and know
the delivery van was safe, locked in the yard
with the brewery trucks, and my job secure.

April is National Poetry Month

Search for poety audio clips by poem title or the author's name. Hear The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Speech and Rhythm
Rhythmic Synchrony governs conversation, and is part of life from infancy to old age. Tempos may vary from culture to culture and person to person but folks who successfully relate manage to stay in sync.

Collect Playground Poetry Classroom Activity

Music and Reading Connection
students who were highly involved in the arts had higher grades and standardized test scores. Find information about the Broca's area, How to Integrate Music and Reading, why Music Makes You Smarter Research, Study Ties Mental Abilities To Interaction of Emotion and Cognitive Skills, Rhythm Syllables, Languages' rhythm and language acquisition

Nursery Rhymes Tell Stories

NATIONAL POETRY SLAM

Marshall Davis Jones : "Touchscreen"

Before Beat

The Anarchist Encyclopedia: A Gallery of Saints & Sinners
Kenneth Rexroth Born in 1905 & orphaned at the age of twelve, Rexroth spent most of his teenage years in Chicago, where he worked as a newspaper reporter & helped run a jazz coffee house, mingling with the musicians, artists, writers, radicals & eccentrics of the roaring twenties. Disillusioned with the Bolsheviks, he became an anarchist & was for several years an active member of the IWW. In his late teens he began hitching all over the country, working in the Far West as a cowboy cook & wrangler & at various farm & forestry jobs & camping in the mountains. In 1927 he moved to San Francisco, where his work in labor, civil rights & antiwar struggles, his founding of the San Francisco Libertarian Circle, & his writings, radio programs & public poetry readings helped lay the foundation for the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s & 1960s.

BEAT GENERATION

Beat Generation of Poets

The Beat Museum
San Francisco museum dedicated to Beat generation authors and their legacy. The collections section features images of selected items from the museum's holdings of books, manuscripts, and ephemera, such as a Jack Kerouac autograph and bobble head doll, signed pictures of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, and covers of books by and about Beat authors.

Present at the Creation: Kerouac's "On the Road"audio and video of Kerouac reading, image of the scroll
2002 report about the creation of Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road," which was published in 1957 and had been "completed -- from start to finish -- in only three weeks. And he used just one long, scrolled piece of paper, improvising endlessly, just like a jazz musician."

Beat Poet Ted Joans, 1928-2003 by Robin D. G. Kelley
Joans's mantra was "Jazz is my religion and surrealism is my point of view."
On May 7 2003, Ted Joans, extraordinary poet and world citizen, joined the ancestors. If you didn't know Ted, then you couldn't really dig how the Village became hip in the 1950s. The truly "teducated" knew Mr. Joans as a tornado of a man, slight in stature, copper in tone with big dancing eyes, who spoke in up-tempo cadences, as if he swallowed a horn and had a rhythm section under his hat. Meeting Ted eight years ago, I learned to possess the power to pull the marvelous out of a pot or a champagne glass, a sliver of garlic or a tattered roll of paper, a memory, story, or song.
Born in Cairo, Illinois, Joans came into the world on July 4, 1928, but contrary to myth he was not born on a riverboat. He studied trumpet, sang bebop, and earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from Indiana University before moving to Greenwich Village in 1951 and becoming a true bohemian. He was one of the original Beat poets, though you wouldn't know it from most Beat anthologies. He was the author of over 30 books of poetry, prose, and collage, including Black Pow-Wow, Beat Funky Jazz Poems, Afrodisia, Jazz is Our Religion, Double Trouble, Wow, and Teducation. Joans was the granddaddy of bringing jazz and "spoken word" together on the bandstand. When his former roommate, the great saxophonist Charlie Parker, passed away in 1955, it was Joans who began scrawling "Bird Lives!" all over Lower Manhattan.
A well-known black expatriate, Joans initially bypassed Europe and went straight to the Motherland in the early 1960s. Timbuktu became his home base, but he traveled around much of the world—a boho hobo and proud of it—doing poetry readings, writing jazz criticism, creating "happenings" as such events came to be called. He exchanged ideas with the leading figures of surrealism, hung out with Jack Kerouac, met an admiring Malcolm X, broke bread with Afro-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam and African American painter Bob Thompson, swapped bread tales with singer and hustler "Babs" Gonzalez, and played invisible man when the invites came with no bread. In recent years, he lived and traveled with his companion/compatriot, artist Laura Corsiglia Joans.

Did you know the words beat, and dig are Irish American Vernacular English?

San Francisco Bay Area photographer Larry Keenan. The site features examples of his photos of topics such as the Beat Generation (Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg), 1960s and 1970s counterculture (San Francisco Human Be-In in January 1967, and student protests), City Lights bookstore, and more.

Cowboy Poetry

• Cowboy Poetry Gatheringstarted in 1985 the last and most resilient vestiges of the Old West banded together in the dead of winter to cement their heritage.
• Kenneth Wiggins Porter who wrote The Negro on the American Frontier (Arno, 1971) and cowboy poetry - The Kansas Poems
• Black Cowboy Poetry
• Cowboy Poetry Explained An essay by Hal Cannon, Founding Director of the Western Folklife Centeran An amazing amalgam of language, style and code which forever would identify Americans. It was a jazz of Irish storytelling and lore, Scottish seafaring and cattle tending, Moorish and Spanish Horsemanship, European Cavalry, African improvisation, and a reluctant observation of Native American survival that can be heard and seen in this way of life, even today.

Copyright information from The American Magazine where this was first published in 1934 and formerly referred to this poem as "Man in the Glass".

The Guy in the Glass by Dale Wimbrow, (c) 1934

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.

For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife,
Who judgment upon you must pass.
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.

He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest,
For he's with you clear up to the end,
And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.

You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,
And think you're a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
If you can't look him straight in the eye.

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you've cheated the guy in the glass.

"The Guy in the Glass" Written in 1934
By Peter "Dale" Wimbrow Sr., 1895-1954

RESOURCES

FLOCABULARY - RAPPERS HIP HOP HANDBOOK
The Rapper's Handbook Guide to Freestyling, Writing Rhymes and Battling is the complete how-to-guide for up-and-coming rappers and everyone who wants to learn to rap. Did you know that a poem is available for each weekday of the school year from the Library of Congress Poetry 180 project?

Poetry Foundation poetry activities for children.

Poetry Everywhere Collection grades 7 - 12

Teaching Poetry in K12 education.

National Endowment for the Arts Announces Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest High school students across the nation to compete in national poetry recitation contest Contact: Sally Gifford 202-682-5606 giffords@arts.gov

Online Poetry Classroom
Academy of American Poets will launch the first-ever Poetry Read-a-Thon. Geared for middle school students (grades 5-8), the Read-a-Thons goals are to celebrate the reading of poems and writing about poems. In addition to emphasizing the pleasure and fun of reading poetry, the Read-a-Thon will facilitate the students development of writing and comprehension skills. Visit the Online Poetry Classroom to find a wealth of resources, including Teacher Forums where teachers can share ideas and seek help from colleagues; Pedagogical & Critical Essays about poetry; extensive links to relevant websites; Curriculum Units & Lesson Plans; biographies of hundreds of poets; and nearly two-thousand poems.

Poetry that can be read online

Poetry Archives

What do poetry and math have in common?

Academy of American Poets

Online Writng Tools Poetry Online Resources and Searchable Databases

A poem a day for american high schools

Cinquains & Diamantes-Creative Writing for Kids

ABOUT Ray Kurzweil the Cybernetic Poet has created an interactive, intelligent software suite designed to act as a Poet's assistant as a Free download from Cyberart Technologies Inc. "With a little cyberhelp anyone can write creative adaptations based on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's half-rhymes, William Butler Yeat's Alliterations; just to name a few," said Kurzweil.

ONLINE ARCHIVE TO FEATURE POETRY RECORDINGS
Andrew Motion, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, and record producer Richard Carrington are creating an online archive of recordings of English-speaking poets. The Poetry Archive will include recordings of poets including Tennyson, Yeats, Kipling, Betjeman, and Sassoon and will also feature recordings of living poets reading their own work, including Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, and Harold Pinter. Recordings of some important poets do not exist, however, including A.E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence. In some cases, poets were recorded reading their work shortly before they died, allowing future generations to hear those poets. Motion and Carrington said the archive will prove especially valuable for students and teachers. Motion said, "The readings are at once instant in their appeal, and lingering in their impact." BBC, 30 November 2005

Cinquain Poetry - what is it...examples given

Poetry Magazine
Founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912 and still going. When the magazine was first published, Monroe remarkedThe Open Door will be the policy of this magazine-may the great poet we are
looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! On the homepage, visitors can learn about each months Featured Poets, and also take a look at the Featured Prose piece. Find articles about poetry slams, the work of the Persian poet Rumi, and The Poem as Comic Strip.