Celebrate April Poetry Month-Read and Enjoy Poems

National Poetry Poster 2015
by Roz Chast

Each year, the Academy of American Poets partners with award-winning designer Chip Kidd to commission a poster in celebration of National Poetry Month. More than 120,000 posters are distributed to be displayed in classrooms, libraries, and bookstores, from coast-to-coast. This year’s poster was designed by National Book Award finalist Roz Chast and inspired by Mark Strand.

Rosalind "Roz" Chast (November 26, 1954) is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She was the 2014 National Book Award finalist for her non-fiction 

"Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" 

Told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.

Her idiosyncratic cartoonist’s style cocoons this profound story of suffering in laughter: her domineering mother, her sweet, helpless father, the decidedly un-hip Brooklyn neighborhood where they live, the apartment they share, and the assisted living center where they go to die all come to life in vivid layers of anxiety, guilt, grime, humor, love, and sadness.

Ever Ready April Feature: Poems and poets to celebrate April Poetry Month.

This poem by Ralph Fletcher seemed a good fit for the National April Poetry Poster by Roz Chast.

Hungry for Poetry

by Ralph Fletcher

First I saw him chew
a tender Japanese haiku. 

He ate a foot-long sonnet
with mustard seed spread upon it.

He downed a bag of ripe cinquains
while walking in the pouring rain.

He gulped an epic, chomped an ode,
wolfed a couplet to cure his cold.

He munched so many limericks,
they made him absolutely sick.

He tried a plate of fresh free verse;
but all that did was make things worse.

He took some onomatopoeia
to cure a case of diarrhea.

He ate a poem of sixteen lines,
and after that he felt just fine.