Micah and I are actually ahead of the game for this year’s National Poetry Month and can therefore offer some bonus tracks and flashbacks!

The deal was to record a reading each week by a poet we hadn’t recorded before (we’ve each recorded many) and then share it to our blogs.

Here’s a little flashback mix tape from 2012’s Poetry Month when I was, of all insane ideas, recording and writing about a different poem each day. It was supposed to be “30 Poets, 30 Days,” but I confess–I never told you–day 10 and day 20 were the same poet! I didn’t realize it until May or June and by then the deed was done.

Here’s Day 10: “Your Were Wearing,” by Kenneth Koch

I had been enjoying some of the video “readings” by Mathew Macfadyen which were actually performances, acting the poems out, rather than just reading them, like I normally did. So I thought I would give it a try.  So here is the poem, performed by Mathew that inspired Kenneth Koch to write the poem that I was inspired by Mr. Macfadyen (yes, that is how he spells it) to perform.

Day  19, Prequel and Bonus Track: “This is Just to Say,” by William Carlos Williams

Oh! And here’s Micah’s reading of this poem for last year’s PoMo. If you’ve ever been given a poetry writing assignment by an English teacher or a workshop leader, there’s a good chance you’ve been asked to write your own “Refrigerator Poem,” like that one. A note left for someone, saying more than the words on the page.

Kenneth Koch couldn’t settle on just one note, so he wrote the following, which was probably the most fun I’ve had in memorizing and performing someone else’s work.

Day 20: “Variations on a Them by William Carlos Williams,” by Kenneth Koch

So, whether you are one of those people celebrating National Poetry Month, or one grumbling, “Why do we need this? I read poetry every day!” I wish you more poems in your life and a very happy . . . um . . . April, 2018.