Happy Poem in Your Pocket Day! If you aren’t familiar with this annual event, it is one of the celebrations of poetry organized by the Academy of American Poets as part of National Poetry Month. The concept is simple enough for anyone to participate, even if you haven’t been planning for this for days as my students and I have been (I give them extra credit points for marking the day). As you might surmise from the title, you simply print out a poem, put it in your pocket, and carry it around with you all day, sharing it with people at your work, school, library, bookstore, or … anywhere, really. Of course, for modern poets and poetry lovers, that includes social media; AAP is asking people to put your poem on your Facebook or other social media, and to use Twitter to share it with the hashtags #pocketpoem, #SavetheNEA and/or #ThankYouNEA (because the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the agencies President Trump wants to defund in his budge proposal, gave AAP a grant to help fund Poem in Your Pocket Day).
Don’t have a poem in mind? Don’t worry–part of the NEA grant went to formatting a number of poems that are appropriate for this occasion. Just go to the Poem in Your Pocket Day website, download their PIYP pdf, and pick your favorite.
This year, to support the March for Science, I’m using one from the collection of Poets for Science (click here for my previous post on that topic).
So why not jazz up your Thursday by sharing a poem with your friends? You’ll be glad you did!
PS––If you have a poem for today, please share a link or at least the title in the comments below.
BlissFullU 