Last Wednesday Wisdom for April - Poetry Month Wrap-up

Once again, it's time for Last Wednesday Wisdom. On the last Wednesday of every month, I serve up a potpourri of advice, inspiration and other tidbits I've come across in recent weeks. We've been celebrating National Poetry Month all of this month, so today I'm sharing poetry-related morsels.

And if you're wondering how I did with the poetry month challenge I introduced at the beginning of the month, read to the end for a report. 

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.
-- Joseph Roux

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
​-- Emily Dickinson

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
​-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

We all tell stories and write poems . . . to keep awe and aspiration and comprehension and the other components of hopeful lives bright in each other's hearts.
-- Barry Lopez in Poets & Writers​, Jan/Feb 2016

If you can't be a poet, be the poem.
-- David Carradine

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
​-- Carl Sandburg

When I first started writing poetry as a high schooler, I adopted what I call "The Seven Layers of Enigma" model. I wrote a verse that I did not understand, but was sure that others would marvel at simply because it was so inscrutable.
-- Joseph Bathanti in The Writer, April 2016

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
​-- William Butler Yeats

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

So, about that challenge. At the beginning of the month, I vowed to read poetry every day. That I did. I read my way through David Tucker's poetry collection, Late for Work and dipped into Trumbull Ave. by Michael Lauchlan, whom I met at this year's Rally of Writers in Lansing, Michigan. I also discovered Ada Limón and John Brehm,  whose poems appear in  the May 2016 issue of The Sun. And of course, I loved reading the work of HeartWood guest bloggers Jonathan Riedel and Sandra Bernard.
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​But there was another part to that challenge. I pledged to write a poem a day. I did write poems, more than I've ever written in one month (fifteen so far, and the month isn't over). But some days slipped by poem-less. Other days, I deliberately followed the advice of Ansel Adams, quoted in last month's installment of Last Wednesday Wisdom: 

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

I guess there were quite a few fuzzy-word days and not many silent ones, because I took a LOT of photographs. For example:

​​But even if I missed some days, I kept coming back to writing poems--trying different forms and sometimes making a game of it. One of the most fun things I tried was taking random words from someone else's poems and trying to make my own poem from those words. I won't go into detail here, but if you'd like to read more about the process and what I came up with, click here.

​Now that I've given you my report, tell me how you did with your poetry month challenges. I know some of you planned to read poetry, others were inspired to write their own or paint pictures. Let's hear how that went!