National Poetry Month, or as I like to call it (cut the crap, stop denying yourself)

Do you dislike poetry? Does the word itself induce high school flashbacks to a time when a bulky clip-art speckled text book told you to find the meaning beneath the meaning? Well then your aversion is understandable. *****************But

I dare you to pick up a book of contemporary poetry. The pageant has evolved. Poetry is sick, twisted, weird, violent, moving, readable....magnetic. Flash fiction? please...

Short attention span? strange tastes? What are you doing not reading poetry? It's like porn and painting and applesauce all in one! If you want something chiller that exists too...*********but

Poetry is there for people who hate grammar, and conventions, or people who love them and want to play with them. If what your brain spits out is to disjointed, or too vitriolic for prose....it becomes consumable as poetry.

Mark has done an amazing job bringing in some of the newest most exciting poets out there. We have the standards too. So.....if you want to expand your reading, challenge your narrative, improve your composing, painting, writing, thinking and living....find a cover or title that speaks to you, read a poem....if you hate it put it down (life's too short-juts pick up another) If you love it you will find a never ending supply of that wealth.

Poetry is not what you read in High School, or for that matter college. It is inappropriate, vivid, uncomfortable ENTERTAINING and alive...and the good stuff is very impolite.

You'll be making your significant other/cat listen as you slur your new favorite poem over 3 glasses of wine and tears...I promise.

Here's what I'm reading now:

April Mowing the Lawn

Drunk and barefoot is surprisingly

Meticulous, especially in the corners,

Shoving the old vrooming machine deep

In the knee-high thrushes of weeds and mint

And flush with the giant slate stone steps

Some glacier dumped a millions years ago.

Up and down, back and forth. Why bother?

I yell to her. Why not simply ask all the horses

Over to take the blades down with their teeth?

Hell, let it grow- Like the golden shadow cast

By our growing pile of beer bottles, like

Who cares? She yells back over the motor that

In South Acworth, a lawn's merely all you

Choose to take away from all that's there

To take away.

from collection Drunk by Noon

(by the kickass Jennifer Knox)