Follow on InstagramIn the past, librarians have distributed poems to local hospitals in Charlottesville, Virginia, and winesellers in San Fransisco, California handed out books of short poems to shoppers.
According to NPR,people across the country are celebrating in unique ways this year. A sandwich vendor in Charlottesville, Virginia is putting poems in the sack lunches, rather than the customary chocolate chip cookie. A third-grade teacher in Pennsylvania had her students sew pockets on their shirts since many have no easily accessible pockets.
Poets.org recommends handwriting "some lines on the back of your business cards" or distributing "bookmarks with your favorite immortal lines."
If you're at a loss for which lines you'd like to share, printable poems can be found at Poets.org:
Ted Kooser is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Hailed by Dana Gioia as a writer "who has written more perfect poems than any poet of his generation," Kooser is widely praised for his plainspoken style, his gift for metaphor, and his quiet discoveries of beauty in ordinary things. In announcing his appointment as Poet Laureate, Librarian of Congress James Billington said, "Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and the first Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse reaches beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways."
Pocket Poem
If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.
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The funny thing I had never heard of Poem in my Pocket day until I started writing for Valarie at Jump Into A Book. You two think a lot alike and have the same interests. Small world :)
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