Back in 1996, the Academy of American Poets launched the month of April as National Poetry Month to remind the public that poets and poetry are part of the national cultural conversation, both for social discourse and education.

In the past 25 years, almost a billion readers, students, teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishers, families, and poets have celebrated this month with a variety of events and practices. In years past, poetry readings, book festivals, and literary lectures were just a few ways to honor, recognize, and discover poetry during the month of April.

In 2021 virtual events abound for poetry lovers, like Zoom readings, online workshops, and a bevy of prompts to inspire a poem of one’s own. Full disclosure, I studied poetry in college and grad school, and it has a very special place in my heart, which makes me a bit biased toward this national month of recognition. But, for those of you who are new to poetry, or it’s been a while since you’ve engaged with poetry, the easiest way to celebrate National Poetry Month is by reading poetry. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Whether virtual or in-person, the classroom is a great place to introduce and celebrate poetry. Whether a teacher yourself, or homeschooling, or supplementing virtual school, try to incorporate a “Poem of the Day” for your children/students during the week. This is also a great weekday practice for adults. Obviously, you’d want to take the weekends off and enjoy this spring weather. FYI, outside time helps boost creativity; just ask Jane Kenyon, William Butler Years, Sara Teasdale, John Keats, Mary Olivier, and Robert Frost, to name a few. Poetry of the natural world can be the most accessible for beginners and provides a roundabout way to learn and explore the use of metaphors.

There are many online resources to supply you with daily poems. The Writer’s Almanac, curated by Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame, sends daily emails with poems by mostly classic and contemporary American poets, as well as literary facts for the date. You can go to the source at Poets.Org and sign up for poem-a-day emails. The Poetry Foundation also has a poem-of-the-day subscription.

If you are looking for more diverse and modern work, check out The Slowdown at slowdownshow.org for hundreds of poems by living and working poets. This show is currently on hiatus, but its backlog is rich, with a variety of voices.

Reading a range of daily poems will help give you a sense of the kind of poetry you like, whether it be narrative, odes, elegies, poems in verse, prose poems, poems with surrealistic images, or impressionistic language. Once you identify the style or feel of poems you gravitate towards, you can then take a deeper dive and read a whole collection of poems. Either by a particular poet or an anthology of poems.

The Best American Poetry yearly anthology gives you a wide breadth of poetic styles and voices. If you find a poem or poems that resonate, look into other work by those poets to see if it speaks to you. You may just find your new favorite writer.

Another way to discover poetry is by asking a librarian or bookseller for recommendations. If you are new to poetry, be honest. Ask what someone who knows next-to-nothing about poetry would be able to access. You don’t want to jump off the metaphoric deep-end and get lost in the literal white space. FYI: white space is the area on the page around the poem between the end of one line and the beginning of the next. Line breaks and white space act as a guide to the reader on how to navigate the poem.

To take a deeper dive into poetry, if you have been consuming media via podcasts during this pandemic like me, I highly recommend On Being, a radio show and podcast that explores spiritual inquiry, science, healing, and community through poetry.

Not only does this show discuss poetics, but it works almost like a salve for the spirit, helping listeners see the beauty in the written word and the world around us.

For my own poetry practice, while I would love to sit in a cozy chair all day and devour whole volumes of poetry, it’s simply not practical. Besides the daily email poems I read, I also set myself a goal of reading just three poems from a book of poetry each day. This helps me take my time and not feel like I must rush to finish the end and move on to the next. I pace my reading, much like a poem paces its rhythm. Yes, poetry takes time to read. Quite often, a poem is meant to be read more than once to “catch” and understand everything going on.

If all of this seems like too much, remember many of us were introduced to poetry at a young age; think of Dr. Seuss’s melodic stories and the prayers you learned as a child. We all have our own natural cadence in language and thought. And when you read your own voice (or a version of your voice) in a poem, it’s like the electricity coming back on after a thunderstorm.