National Poetry Month - Day 1

National Poetry Month has begun!

In honor of National Poetry Month, we will, as in past years, offer a poem each day as a gift throughout the month of April. If you'd like to be added to our email list so you receive them directly each day, let us know.  Otherwise, check here.

A note about National Poetry Month:

National Poetry Month was initiated by the American Academy of Poets and was first celebrated in 1996. When the American Academy of Poets conceived National Poetry Month, they defined seven goals in association with the holiday. I'm printing them here in their entirety because they are so relevant (I particularly love the second and third).

The Goals of National Poetry Month are to:
-Highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets
-Introduce more Americans to the pleasures of reading poetry
-Bring poets and poetry to the public in immediate and innovative ways
-Make poetry a more important part of the school curriculum
-Increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media
-Encourage increased publication, distribution, and sales of poetry books
-Increase public and private philanthropic support for poets and poetry

Without further ado --- today's poem:

I'm running this poem for the first day of April because it is a poem about releasing one's fears, lying back, and surrendering ourselves to something larger. This is how spring can feel to me, especially in the cold Northeast: the first puffs of spring come breezing over the snowbanks and suddenly shoulders are relaxing, heads are tilting up, and people start breathing again. Strawberries will come! Asparagus! Wild greens of their own accord! So take this poem as an entrance to the spring and another year. Lie back, and let the world hold you.

First Lesson
Philip Booth 

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Philip Booth, 1925-2007, was born and died in Hanover, New Hampshire. Booth spent much of his childhood in Castine, Maine, in a house that had been in his mother's family for generations. The landscape of New England, particularly the coast of Maine, often occupies a place of primary importance in Booth's poems.  Booth studied with Robert Frost as a freshman at Dartmouth College and obtained his M.A. in English from Columbia University. He later taught at Dartmouth, Wellesley College, and Syracuse University, where he was one of the founders of the graduate program in creative writing. Over the course of his career, Philip Booth published ten collections of poetry, from Letter From a Distant Land in 1957 to Lifelines: Selected Poems, 1950-1999 in 1999. Booth's honors include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the Theodore Roethke Prize. In 1983 he was elected a Fellow of The Academy of American Poets.

This biography adapted from www.poets.org and www.poetryfoundation.org.

~April