Happy National Poetry Month Eve!
Tomorrow April begins, and with it, many folks will take on a National Poetry Month Project. Each year, for the past fourteen of fifteen Aprils, along with many other writers, I have chosen to write and share a daily poem. I like to write these collections around themes, and during the weeks before April, I toss many ideas around inside of my head. Here is a list of my past projects:
2010 - Birth of The Poem Farm - I wrote a poem each day for a month, beginning actually, on March 29, 2010. This blog just to be a one month project, just for me, to get me writing again as I awaited the publication of FOREST HAS A SONG. At the end of April 2010, I was having too much fun to stop, decided to go for one whole year, publishing a poem at The Poem Farm each day. And I stayed to post on Fridays.
2011 - Daily Poems Again - For each day of April 2011, I continued to write and share daily poems. However, I had no theme as the blog was just entering its second year.
2012 - A-Z Dictionary Hike - Here's where the themes began. Each day of April 2012, I opened my children's dictionary to a different letter, starting with A, ending with Z. Eyes closed, I pointed to a word and this word became the title of that day's poem.
2013 - Drawing into Poems - For each day of April 2013, I slowed myself down and looked closely at an object, drawing it with black pen into my notebook. On some days, I wrote poems from these drawings, but on many days, I simply allowed the looking-drawing practice to practice becoming a closer observer.
2014 - Thrift Store - For each day of April 2014, I wrote a poem from a photograph of an item I found in a thrift store. These poems are no longer at The Poem Farm as they are trying to be a book.
2015 - Sing That Poem - For each day of April 2015, I wrote a poem to the meter of a well-known tune and challenged readers to match the poem to the tune by seeing if it was singable to the same meter. One of these singable poems ended up in my book WITH MY HANDS: POEMS ABOUT MAKING THINGS.
2016 - Wallow in Wonder - For my 2016 National Poetry Month project, I celebrated learning and writing from learning, writing poems from each daily Wonder at Wonderopolis. I have not yet collected these posts into one post, but I may one day.
2017 - Writing the Rainbow - Each day of April 2017, I randomly selected a different Crayola crayon from a new box of 64. Each day, I wrote a poem inspired by the color I chose. These poems all ended up telling the story of a young city girl and the moments of her daily life and are no longer here at the blog.
2018 - 1 Subject *** 30 Ways - Each day of April 2018, I wrote daily poems focused on the constellation Orion. Each poem played with a different poetic technique, and I used the lessons in my own book, POEMS ARE TEACHERS: HOW STUDYING POETRY STRENGTHENS WRITING IN ALL GENRES, to stretch my writing. These poems are not currently online.
2019 - Tell a Poemstory - Five years ago, I shared a series of 30 free verse poems that told a story about a boy named John and a dog named Betsy and a lady named Betsy. I am so happy to report that these will soon be published in a picture book by Eerdmans.
2020 - Roll the Dice - Four years ago, I rolled three word dice daily (from inside my vintage camper Betsy) and wrote daily poems inspired by one, two, or three of the rolled words. You can watch the videos that went with these on my YouTube channel, Keeping a Notebook Videos #13 - #42.
2021 - Four years ago, I returned to the classroom as a fourth grade teacher after 22 years away and did not share a public poetry project in this space but rather wrote with my own students.
2022 - Pick a Proverb - Two years ago, for each day of April, I wrote a new poem inspired by a popular saying such as "The grass is always greener on the other side" or "One person's trash is another person's treasure." These poems are out on submission in the hope that they will one day grow up into a book.
2023 - 24 Hours - Two years ago, I shared a daily poem about 1 hour in 1 day in the life of an old barn (my old barn) beginning with midnight and ending right before the following midnight. Because April has 30 days, I wrote and tucked 6 additional poems into the month.
2024 - One More or Less Line Crow - Last year I studied crows and shared a new crow poem each day of April. The number of lines went from 1 to 15 and then back down to 1.
And this year, I welcome you to HELLO MY NAME IS....
For National Poetry Month 2025, I will share share poems written in the voice of Little Red Riding Hood, and I invite you to join me in writing in the voice of someone else too.. You might choose a fairy tale character or a book character or a person from history or anyone else real or imagined. These are your poems, so you make the decisions. Each April day, I will share my poem and a little bit about writing poetry. Mostly, we’ll just be writing in short lines with good words and not worrying about rhyming. Meaning first. Our focus this month will be adopting the perspective of another…for 30 days.
I invite you to join me in this project!
To do so, simply:
1. Choose a character from fiction or history or somewhere else in the world of space and time, and commit to writing a daily poem in this person's voice for the 30 days of April 2025. You might even choose an animal.
2. Write a new poem for each day of April.
Here's a grid to help!
Teachers and writers, if you wish to share any HELLO MY NAME IS... subjects or poems, please email them to me or tag me @amylvpoemfarm. I would love to see what your students write and how you approach your projects.
Well, here we go....I look forward to spending the next 30 days with you.
To learn about more National Poetry Month projects and all kinds of April goodness, visit Jama Rattigan at Jama's Alphabet Soup where Jama has generously gathered this coming month's happenings. Happy National Poetry Month 2025 Eve!
xo,
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