Chat Line

I've been looking for a poem to read out loud. I thought about one from Christian Bok's new volume Eunoia, introduced to me by Kiirstin at A Book a Week, because it's so much fun to say "If Klimpt limns it/If Liszt lilts it," but I think I'll keep looking. It's one of the pleasures of this snowy week; I have another few days to come up with something good.

In the meantime, here's a kind of poem that is not fun out loud. This one, by John Menaghan, is meant to be seen:

Chat Line
(in a bus shelter)

I.
"Are you living
with Autism?
Do you want to
talk to someone?
Call Autism
Link now.
You don't have to
go it alone!"

II.
Are you living?
With Autism?
Do you want to?

Talk to someone.
Call Autism.
Link now.

You don't have to!
Go it alone!

Do you have a favorite poem for reading out loud? Children's poems, parodies, and nonsense rhymes are always good. Any Robert Service poem is good, as my friend Laura has repeatedly demonstrated. I love to sing an Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" or Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway." Sharon Olds hardly ever fails to seize an audience's attention; one of my favorites of hers for reading out loud is "The American Way," a prose poem. But I'm looking for something new. Where should I look?

April poems

April is National Poetry Month, and I've been helping a librarian put together a display of poems about April. It's a month of potential. It is April that "with his shoures soote/The droughte of March hath perced to the roote" (Chaucer, General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales). It is, of course, "the cruelest month, breeding/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain" (Eliot, The Waste Land). But "Oh, to be in England, Now that April's there" (Browning, Home Thoughts From Abroad). It is a month remarkable for its changeability:
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time
April is also a metaphor for renewal, rebirth, even love: "thy body to me is april/in whose armpits is the approach of spring" (e.e. cummings, my love).

If you sign up at
http://www.poets.org/poemADay.php
you can get a poem sent to you every day for the rest of this month.