In honor of National Poetry Month, the Sheridan Libraries will create a series of “pocket poems”: poems on pocket-sized pieces of paper, available throughout Eisenhower Library for you to pick up. We hope they will encourage you to take a poetry break at this busy time of year—a poem to read, think about and share with your friends and colleagues.
But what poems should we include? That’s where you come in! We’d like your suggestions.
Please tell us the title, author and (preferably) full text of your favorite poem on this form—or e-mail the information. The deadline for submissions is midnight on Monday, April 12. From your submissions, we’ll select a few dozen that fit our parameters. Each poem has to be short enough to fit on a pocket-sized piece of paper (or excerpt-able). And we can only reproduce poems old enough to be in the public domain—that means, published before 1923.
Not sure what to suggest? Use our online poetry resources to help you find poems.
Literature Online contains the full text of thousands of poems—as well as Poets on Screen, clips of poets reading their work. There are lots of choices in the multi-faceted Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections, which includes the Faber Poetry Library, African-American Poetry and Canadian Poetry, among others. Want to narrow it down? Look in the more focused e-anthologies published by Alexander Street Press, like Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, American Song and Latino Literature.
You can also look for poems on the website of the Academy of American Poets, which is spearheading a nationwide “Poem in Your Pocket” campaign.