Happy National Poetry Month!

NaPoWriMo has arrived! April is National Poetry Month, and Read Write Poem is celebrating with a thirty poems in thirty days challenge. Here's my angle: write all the poems on a theme and have a draft for a chapbook. Yes, some days I might miss a poem, and on other days everything I write might frankly stink. That's what good friends and revision are for. But that won't be the case every day, and getting a few gems out of NaPoWriMo will be worth joining this big alliterative orgy of clever slant rhymes, puns, hypertexts, wit, and sharp social criticism.

An excellent place to look for inspiration is Poets.org's Poem A Day e-mail list, which is also archived on the website. I could list my favorite online places to read poems, but I think it's more fun to find your own. Start with the great work on Fringe and start following links. I always arrive to something cool, most recently Hit and Run Magazine.

Still not fired up? Read Charles Bernstein's satirical Against National Poetry Month. He's right perhaps about what the aim of the corporate sponsorship of NaPoMo is about, but that's no reason to ignore perfectly good free poems a day, and if you're inspired to write anti-poems sometimes, that's good, too.