National Poetry Month 2025

April is National Poetry Month. Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and—of course—poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.

 You might want to celebrate this month by getting a Poem-a-Day, curated in April by Willie Perdomo, and reading a free daily poem in your inbox. 

You can follow the thousands of celebrations on social media with the official hashtag #NationalPoetryMonth. Follow the Academy of American Poets (@POETSorg) on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and X for free poetry resources and poems to share throughout April

Since the beginning of this National Poetry Month, I have ordered a free copy of the poster (or download a pdf version on their website) to display in my classrooms and at readings. The 2025 poster features an excerpt from “Gate A-4”, a poem by former Young People’s Poet Laureate and Academy Chancellor Naomi Shihab Nye  - “This / is the world I want to live in. The shared world." and artwork by New York Times-bestselling author and illustrator Christy Mandin who was selected by Scholastic—the global children’s publishing, education, and media company—to create the artwork for this year’s poster as part of a National Poetry Month collaboration with the Academy of American Poets.

A lesson plan featuring Nye’s poem is also available through the Academy’s Teach This Poem series to bring the poster to life for National Poetry Month.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Finding the Angel Within: An Interview with Ken Ronkowitz

I was interviewed for the National Poetry Month episode of the podcast L-Town Radio. The host, Joe O'Brien, is a multi-hyphenate librarian-poet-musicmaker at the Livingston Public Library in New Jersey, which is the town where I spent several decades as an English teacher. 

We had a long conversation, and I talked about my experiences as an English teacher, teaching poetry and writing poetry. We got into my invented form, the "Ronka," and how writing a poem is like "finding the angel within." 

The interview is broken into parts and mixed with library staff reading favorite poems, and news of the library. 

If you are curious to hear the voice of and know a bit more about the person behind Poets Online, you can listen on their website  or on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Concerning Submissions

 

As we approach the deadline for submissions to Poets Online each month, the final days always bring in the most submissions.

Last year, we had 575 submissions. That's an average of about 50 per the monthly call. That is small compared to the big journals, but it's fine because we are small with a few volunteer staff and a one-man production team. There are no fees to submit and that does attract poets. 

We don't have a number that we plan to use use each issue, but it generally whittles its way done to 10-20 poems currently. 

It is important that you follow our rather simple submission guidelines, but that is true for any magazine, journal or book publisher. And yet, we always receive poems that have nothing to do with that month's prompt.That is an immediate rejection. We also receive poems that are not correctly formatted, which moves them down in the acceptance list. Then, there are the most difficult ones to decide on. If all the readers give it a thumbs up, it's included. Then we work our way down the list.

On Poets Online, we ask for email submissions in plain text, with the subject line being submission so that our mail filter puts it in a folder for readers. Even using submission_ or submit or prompt will push it elsewhere where it may not be read at all.

I am also a reader for a manuscript competition and a print poetry magazine. The submission guidelines for those are more complicated but the process is very similar: last minute submissions, poems that do not match the call, ones that are incorrectly formatted.

MORAL OF THE POST: Read and follow submission guidelines.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Poetry Best Sellers

I occasionally look at what Amazon lists as the "poetry bestsellers." But I do wonder if it should be poetry "bestsellers" (how well do they sell?) or if it should be "poetry" bestsellers (since some are perhaps questionable as poetry). I suppose the list does give a sense of what people are buying and perhaps even a sense of what people (or perhaps just Amazon) considers to be poetry. 

It is nice to see The Iliad & the Odyssey on the list along with The Divine Comedy. I suspect some of the classic titles are due to assigned reading lists. 

I am not surprised to see some Mary Oliver books because I know she is very popular. Then there are the titles by Dr, Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Both authors may be a child's introduction to poetry and rhyme. But there are a good number of authors that I have never heard of or read that might be classified as "pop poetry" or even "poetry light." (Argue amongst yourselves...)

I had a discussion in a literature class recently where I am teaching short stories. A student asked what distinguishes fiction from literature, and who gets to decide. There is that distinction in many bookstores. In my local library, it's all together. Dewey decimal puts Harlan Coben in the same aisle as Joseph Conrad. Amazon groups those two together in bestsellers but also breaks this down into many categories, from Action & Adventure to Women's Adventure Fiction.

My short story students never did settle on overall definitions for fiction and literature, but they agreed that we were reading "literature" and thought that perhaps certain authors were just automatically literature, while others were relegated to fiction.

What do you think?

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org