From the Archive: A Journey Through National Poetry Month’s Past

Tomorrow marks the beginning of one of our favourite months of the year: April is National Poetry Month. Working exclusively with independent Canadian publishers means that we are constantly exposed to a diverse range of poetic voices, which our publishers work tirelessly to discover and foster all across this great nation of ours.While we love to talk poetry pretty much any time of year, it’s become our annual tradition to launch a special NPM blog series, highlighting a group of poets around a particular theme. We’ll tell you about this year’s plan tomorrow (hint: it’s our biggest year yet!) but for now let’s go back into our NPM archive for a reminder of some of the amazing poets we’ve featured.

 The year was 2013. We’d just launched a blog on the website of our parent association, the Literary Press Group, so we decided to go big. We featured 35 poets with a Coast-to-Coast Poetry Project that saw at least one new poem posted daily. These posts also included some insight from the poet about what they were reading and one poem everyone should read. By the end of it, we weren’t sure if we were more tired from all the work we put into the project or from just saying the tongue twister that became the project’s nickname – CoCoPoPro. If you can say that three times fast you’re doing better than we ever could (now and then).

In 2014 we jumped on the League of Canadian Poets’ theme of Poetry City. Getting physical, we featured 12 poems that were each about a different yet specific place in Canada. Included in the features were stories from the poets revealing why that particular place was so inspiring to them.

2015 saw our first NPM on the LPG’s brand new site, All Lit Up. As a way to introduce the Canadian poetry landscape to the wider All Lit Up audience, we thought we’d take a broad approach that both bonafide poetry lovers as well as newbies to poetry could appreciate. Our Poetry Primer series featured 16 established, treasured Canadian poets who each selected an emerging, innovative voice they felt would make a mark on Canadian poetry. We shared a poem from each of the selected emerging poets and asked them why they write poetry and who their influences are. We also put together our first book, ibid., which featured all 32 participating NPM 2015 poets.* * *So if you’re a poetry lover and you’ve just discovered ALU as a homebase for Canadian poetry, dive into our archive of NPM fun and join us all April long as we go on a journey through the interconnected community that is the Canadian poetry landscape.We’ll be back tomorrow to introduce you this year’s NPM theme!