National Poetry Month | Poems I’ll Be Reading

Hello, everyone! With April right around the corner, it’s time to share what I will be reading during National Poetry Month. For the next thirty days, I will be reading one poem per day to celebrate!

Without further ado, here is what I’ll be reading:

• April 1: “Sonnet XCVIII” by William Shakespeare
• April 2: “Said The Poet To The Analyst” + To Bedlam and Part Way Back by Anne Sexton
• April 3: “In Response to Executive Order 9066” by Dwight Okita
• April 4: “Sleeping Trees” by Fady Joudah
• April 5: “The Pelican Chorus” by Edward Lear
• April 6: “The Difference Between Pepsi and Coke” by David Lehman
• April 7: “The Nutritionist” by Andrea Gibson
• April 8: “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” by John Keats
• April 9: “The Rememberings” + Heaven Or This by Topaz Winters
• April 10: “Around Unmun Temple at Ch’Eongdo” by Ko Un
• April 11: “November, 1806” by William Wordsworth
• April 12: “The Legend” by Garrett Hongo
• April 13: “I Am Offering This Poem To You” by Jimmy Santiago Baca
• April 14: “How To Be Perfect” by Ron Padgett
• April 15: “Dialogue with an Artist” by Matthew Sweeney
• April 16: “Ugly” + Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth by Warshan Shire
• April 17: “Domestic Violence” by Eavan Boland
• April 18: “Taking Aim At A Macy’s Changing Room Mirror, I Blame Television” by Marcus Wicker
• April 19: “My Sad Captains” by Thom Gunn
• April 20: “The Golden Shovel” by Terrance Hayes
• April 21: “Dividend of the Social Opt Out” by Jennifer Moxley
• April 22: “Pluto” by Maggie Dietz
• April 23: “All You Own Is Yourself” + Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
• April 24: “Insensibility” by Wilfred Owen
• April 25: “The God Who Loves You” by Carl Dennis
• April 26: “Gifts” by Juliana Horatia Ewing
• April 27: “I Look At The World” by Langston Hughes
• April 28: “Love Is Not All” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
• April 29: “What If You Slept?” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• April 30: “Then I Learned That Society Is Broken, Not Me” + The Princess Saves Herself In This One by Amanda Lovelace

Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who recommended either an individual poem or a book of poetry (or both); I wouldn’t be able to pull off this madcap project without you! I actually received many more recs than I ever thought I would which, let me tell you, felt amazing. I hope you recognize a poem or two on this list as one that you recommended to me and that seeing it make you smile.

An extra-special shout-out goes to Mahima @ The Controversies, whose stellar recommendations make up TWENTY of the poems I’m going to read! She wrote up little annotations for everything she recommended and it all sounded so good that I decided to read, well, everything she recced.

Why did I list entire books of poetry on some days but not on others? I will be reading, as I said, one poem per day, but on Sundays I will also be reading the rest of the book of poetry that that day’s poem comes from! (Sundays are my day off, so I have more free time than usual.)

You can follow along with all my National Poetry Month pursuits! I’ll blog about the poems; you can expect a total of six posts recapping the past five days’ worth of poems each. I may also post some of my own poetry, reviews of poetry books I’ve read lately, et cetera.

I’m SO excited to begin this project next month. I foresee a lot of poem-reading going on during my study breaks, which will be great. I hope you have just as much fun following along with my National Poetry Month celebrations as I will doing them!