by Feng Zhou for National Poetry Month, April 2020 There is an old book called “General Songs of Tang” in China, which recorded about 3,000 poets and 50,000 poems written in the Tang Dynasty (from 618 to 907). The book earned China its nickname: poetry nation. Today, the book still fascinates and inspires the whole…

Welcome to the first weekly round-up for National Poetry Month 2020. Below are highlights from this week’s NPM announcements, activities, blog, events, poetry prompts and more.  Celebrating the 2020 LCP Book Awards Longlist In honour of our first announcement of the 2020 Book Awards season, we would like to take an opportunity to congratulate and celebrate the…

by Erín Moure for National Poetry Month, April 2020 Toronto-native poet Norma Cole got me translating poetry. I wouldn’t have had the confidence on my own! I’d been improving my French for over a decade in Montreal when, in 1996, Norma emailed me from San Francisco asking me to co-translate some poems from French with…

by Abena Beloved Green for National Poetry Month, April 2020 Over ten years ago, I wrote this prose poem reflecting on driving in Ghana and about how incredible it is that a person wakes up in the morning, goes out in the world and returns in one piece in this country. The amount of traffic…

By Anna Yin for National Poetry Month, April 2020 When I was a kid, like others in China, I was taught to recite Chinese traditional poetry. I didn’t understand why and thought it was just for the culture and language. When a teenage, I occasionally wrote poems in Chinese but forgot them all, well, they…

by Bill Arnott for National Poetry Month, April 2020 A world of poetry. This, I understand. Being witness to stomped-verse haka in Waitangi, the lyrical thrum of Outback didgeridoo, breathy sax in a wet London underpass, red slashed characters on a mud wall in Hebei, tanka blurred through joss smoke in Kyoto, rantings of a…

by Jeevan Bhagwat for National Poetry Month, April 2020 The world is filled with poetry. It spills out from neighbourhood cafes and public school classrooms across the nation, saturating its soil with culture. Now more than ever, poetry is experiencing a renaissance that is manifested in the proliferation of alternative venues where poets can share…