A Brief Guide to National Poetry Month

National Poetry Month at Huffington Post


It's National Poetry Month, an event the Academy of American Poets began sponsoring in 1996 to help call more attention to poetry in America. As has become tradition, the Academy encourages you to spend each day in April with a new poem, which you can sign up to receive, daily, in your inbox from poets.org. This year, the website kicked off the month with "A Story" by Phillip Levine. You follow Levine as he creates the story of a house, which grows to hold a family with a quirky and intensely spiritual father. Take a look. Levine draws you in before reminding of what's beyond what you've created, which could be nothing, or could be the very real world:

Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.