national poetry month 2026 - why are we here? what are we about?

Greetings to all who pass here on this Poetry Friday! (Orientation at this link.) 

On this ball of confusion that is the human world, Nature persists in doing her dependable gorgeous thing, offering us all the reasons we need to do our dependable gorgeous thing as poets. What, you may ask, is that thing, exactly?

Today you will receive answers! Not one definitive answer, but many possible answers, as Linda has offered the Inklings critique group this challenge for the first Friday in April (borrowing from the Poetry Foundation): "Write an...

• Ars Poetica

• A poem that explains the “art of poetry,” or a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem. Horace’s Ars Poetica is an early example, and the foundation for the tradition. While Horace writes of the importance of delighting and instructing audiences, many modernist ars poetica poets argue that poems should be written for their own sake, as art for the sake of art. Archibald MacLeish’s famous “Ars Poetica” sums up the argument: “A poem should not mean / But be.” (Poetry Foundation)

I thought of writing a new piece for this challenge, but knew that I had several already drafted to choose from (who among us has not contemplated the point of it all?), so I trawled my catalog and chose one to revise and update.  Plus I'm sharing a bonus type of one for kids that was published long ago in Sylvia Vardell's Booklinks column!  In both cases, I'm not about telling you what a poem SHOULD do, like Archibald MacLeish, but more about suggesting what a poet is TRYING to do, what a poem COULD do, COULD mean. In the first I imagine poets as engineers of a kind, as magicians, as day laborers, as movers.

In this one, poets are bakers, potters, cooks.

If I had to use fewer words, though, I'd just defer to our glorious, mysterious dead friend Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant---

And now, here are links to my fellow Inklings' blogs, so you can see what they think the art of the poem is, and let's go and see what's brewing with the Progressive Poem, too! Thanks to Tabatha and Cathy; catch up here at Patricia's blog.

Catherine @Reading to the Core
Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone
Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche

Thanks to our host for today, Matt at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme, who's celebrating a shiny year for  A UNIVERSE OF RAINBOWS!  I'm delighted to say that I'll take my turn to host on April 17, with highlights from a conversation called "We Teach Poetry" that I held yesterday with Jone Rush MacCulloch and Margaret Simon. We entertained and educated each other greatly on Zoom, and I'm really looking forward to sharing some of our favorite approaches to teaching poetry to kids, why we think it's important in the first place, and how writing with kids sustains and inspires us. Don't miss it!

Finally, an extra bonus bonus: I found this poem at Jama's Alphabet Soup, featured back in 2021. What a fantastic ars poetica by a British poetry star, Carol Ann Duffy! (And it's a very British poem indeed.) 

THE WORDS OF POEMS by Carol Ann Duffy