To continuously feed yourself new poetry, you can find local literary magazines, subscribe to Poetry Magazine, or sign up for daily poetry emails here or here. Ó Tuama recommends “ The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry” edited by Ilya Kaminsky, and also navigating local bookstores and publishers, like Bloodaxe Books, that feature poetry arranged by topic. Poetry anthologies are an excellent place to start because they offer a range of voices within time periods, places, or topics. The world is full of lyrical collections and melodical prose, and the poetry canon is growing more vibrant each passing day. Poetry is a personal experience-for both the writer and the reader. So if you’re interested, start where you are. Nobody will know everything about all the poetry. And each ocean has thousands of beaches leading into it. So if you’re interested, start where you are.” “Poetry is a vast ocean. “There is no proper way to start,” says Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of Poetry Unbound, a new poetry podcast from The On Being Project. But reading poetry outside of a structured academic space proved complicated for me-how do you read, enjoy, analyze, and remember the pieces you most love? Do you read 10 poems in rapid succession? One at a time? Do you have to sit in a velvet housecoat, surrounded by mahogany bookshelves and a crackling fire, to be considered ‘someone who reads poetry’? How do you even start? Enchanted by the depths of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, I wanted more. “Do you have to sit in a velvet housecoat, surrounded by mahogany bookshelves and a crackling fire, to be considered ‘someone who reads poetry’? ”Īs I grew and my language developed further, I began reading the poetry my teachers fed to me in high school. I put my whole heart into poems I can only laugh about today I’m amused and heart warmed by the complexity I was trying to express with my ten-year-old vocabulary. I rhymed the words “love” and “above” more often than I’d care to admit (with an occasional “dove” in there, too-WHY).

When I began writing poetry as a preteen, I invested my allowance in a rhyming dictionary. Seuss’s melodic stories captured my youthful attention, and I loved listening to how the words bounced off the page to form music of their own. My first experience with poetry was sugary-sweet and dripping in rhyme.

Sad soft music for poetry recitation