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The poet is on the side of
undeceiving the world.
– Seamus Heaney,
Irish poet, playwright, and translator
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Every beginning is only a sequel,
after all, and the book of events is
always open halfway through.
– Wislawa Szymborska,
Polish poet, 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature
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13 poets born in April,
poems from the 17th century
into the 21st century, exploring
the everyday and the unexpected,
from daily life to politics.
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April 13
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1939 – Seamus Heaney born on his family’s farm in Northern Ireland, but lived much of his life in Dublin; prolific and influential major Irish poet, playwright, and translator, notably of Beowolf. He earned a teacher’s certificate and taught at a secondary school in Belfast. His poetry began to be published in 1962. His first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966, garnered much critical acclaim. Heany went on to win the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, and published over 20 poetry collections including: Wintering Out; Seeing Things; Human Chain; and Opened Ground. Heaney died at age 74, after a short illness, in August 2013.
Anything Can Happen
by Seamus Heaney
.
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
.
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
.
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
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“Anything Can Happen” from The Poems of Seamus Heaney, © 2025 by the estate of Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O’Donoghue – Straus and Giroux
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1947 – Rae Armantrout born in Vallejo, California, but she grew up around Navy bases, particularly San Diego; American poet; winner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Versed. She earned a BA from Berkeley, where she studied with Denise Levertov, and an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Armantrout was a founding member of the West Coast Language Poets. She is the author of over two dozen poetry collections, which include Necromance; Money Shot; Conjure; Finalists; and Go Figure.
Thing
by Rae Armantrout
.
We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,
.
for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles
.
and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"
.
though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.
"Thing," from Next Life, © 2007 by Rae Armantrout - Wesleyan University Press
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April 14
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1976 – Jericho Brown born Nelson Demry III in Shreveport, Louisiana; African-American poet, writer, and professor. His book The Tradition won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans, and a PhD from the University of Houston, where he was a teaching fellow from 2002-2007. He was also a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans. Brown is now director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta. His poetry collections include The New Testament and Please. He also edited How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill.
Bullet Points
by Jericho Brown
.
I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we've been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
"Bullet Points" from The Tradition, © 2019 by Jericho Brown – Copper Canyon Press
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1982 – Rachel Swirsky born in San Jose, California into a Jewish family; prolific American speculative fiction and fantasy writer, poet, essayist, editor, and reviewer. She is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In 2008, she was the founding editor of the fantasy fiction podcast PodCastle. Her fiction works have been honored with two Nebula Awards, and nominated several times for Hugo Awards. Swirsky’s poetry has appeared in the Canadian quarterly Ideomancer, the speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede, and the fantastical poetry quarterly Goblin Fruit. Her collection Through the Drowsly Dark: Short Fiction and Poetry was published in 2010. Swirsky lives in Portland, Oregon.
Luna
by Rachel Swirsky
.
Alone
with no one to call
no man, no lady, no rabbit
only footprints of men
who won’t return.
.
“Luna” © 2022 by Rachel Swirsky
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April 15
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1931 – Tomas Tranströmer born in Stockholm; acclaimed and influential Swedish poet, psychologist, novelist, and translator. He was honored with the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. He suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, but continued to write and publish poetry. One of his last volumes of original poems, Den stora gåtan, was published in 2004, translated into English in 2006 as The Great Enigma. Tranströmer died at age 83 in March 2015. His thirteen collections of poetry include: The Half-Finished Heaven; Seeing in the Dark; The Sorrow Gondola; and The Truth Barrier.
National Insecurity
by Tomas Tranströmer
.
The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.
.
As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground
so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.
.
A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.
.
“National Insecurity” from New and Collected Poems, © 1997 by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton – Bloodaxe Books
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1958 – Benjamin Zephaniah born as Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah to a Barbadian father and a Jamaican mother in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK. He was a British spoken word and print poet, novelist, actor, musician, professor of poetry and creative writing, and an anti-racism activist. He began creating dub poetry, a Jamaican form of oral poetry at age 11, and quickly became known for his poetry in the local Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities of the Handsworth district of Birmingham. He was given an old manual typewriter and began to put his poems on paper. He spent time in borstal (youth detention centre) then in his late teens went to prison for burglary. After his release, at age 22 he went to London, and his first book, Pen Rhythm, was published in 1980. He published 13 poetry collections, many of them for children, six novels, five children’s books, and wrote eight plays. He also acted on television, notably as Jeremiah Jesus, in the period crime drama Peaky Blinders. Benjamin Zephaniah was diagnosed with a brain tumor just weeks before he died at age 65 in December 2023.
Who’s Who
by Benjamin Zephaniah
.
I used to think nurses
Were women,
I used to think police
Were men,
I used to think poets
Were boring,
Until I became one of them.
.
“Who’s Who” from Talking Turkeys, © 2014 by Benjamin Zephaniah – Puffin Poetry
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1958 – Anne Michaels born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Canadian poet and novelist. She attended the University of Toronto, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English. Her first poetry collection, The Weight of Oranges, won the 1986 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. Her other poetry collections include: Miner’s Pond; Railtracks; Correspondences; and All We Saw. Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces won 12 awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.
Flowers
by Anne Michaels
.
There's another skin inside my skin
that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;
that looses its memory, its lost language
into your tongue,
erasing me into newness.
.
Just when the body thinks it knows
the ways of knowing itself,
this second skin continues to answer.
.
In the street – café chairs abandoned
on terraces; market stalls emptied
of their solid light,
though pavement still breathes
summer grapes and peaches.
Like the light of anything that grows
from this newly-turned earth,
every tip of me gathers under your touch,
wind wrapping my dress around our legs,
your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.
.
“Flowers” from The Weight of Oranges / Miner's Pond, © 1997 by Anne Michaels – McClelland & Stewart
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April 16
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1918 – Spike Milligan born as Terence Alan Milligan in British Colonial India; Irish-English comedian, writer, musician, poet, playwright, and actor. His family moved back to England after WWI. He left school in the 1930s to work as a clerk while moonlighting as a jazz musician, and joined the Young Communist League. During WWII, he was a signaler in the 56th Heavy Regiment of the Royal Artillery on the south coast of England, but also entertained the troops with comedy sketches and music before being sent to North Africa and then Italy. He was wounded in the leg at the Battle of Monte Cassino, and hospitalized for the wound and shell shock. After the war, he wrote parodies of mainstream plays, which eventually led to The Goon Show. Milligan was the co-creator, chief writer, and a leading cast member of this popular BBC radio comedy show (1951-1960), which the NBC radio network began broadcasting in the U.S. in the mid-1950s. He also appeared on television and in films.. The 1970 TV movie The Other Spike dramatised his nervous breakdown. Milligan died from kidney failure at age 83 in 2002. Among his many poetry collections are Silly Verse for Kids, Small Dreams of a Scorpion, Goblins, Chill Air, and Fleas, Knees and Hidden Elephants.
Silly Poem
by Spike Milligan
.
Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I’ll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?
.
“Silly Poem” from Hidden Words: Collected Poems, © 1993 by Spike Milligan Productions – Penguin Books
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1935 – Sarah Kirsch born as Ingrid Kirsch in Prussian Saxony, but changed her first name to Sarah in protest of her father’s anti-Semitism. Kirsch became a prominent German post-WWII poet and author. After she protested East Germany’s expulsion of poet and dissident Wolf Biermann in 1976, she was excluded from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In 1977 she moved to West Germany, but remained critical of both East and West Germany. She died at age 78 in 2013.
Evening
by Sarah Kirsch
.
Exuberantly the green changes
From lighter to darker loveliness
Strongly the sun now extracts
The light from the trees
Before it slinks off, the flowers
Village cocks in the morning, welcome
The evening with velvet colours
In the floods of ripe fields
Tardy tractors lurch
The sky grows plum blue
And on the tongue still burns
The bite into the fly agaric
O you good sunken cities
Here things are cheerful and happy
Even the dark begins
In glow and splendour.
.
“Evening” from Sarah Kirsch, Poems, © 1983 by Sarah Kirsch; English translations © 1983 by Jack Hirschman – Alcatraz Editions
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1972 – Tracy K. Smith born in Falmouth, Massachusetts but raised in Northern California; African American poet and member of the Harvard English and African American studies faculties since 2021. Smith was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book, Life on Mars. Her other books of poetry include: The Body’s Question; Duende; Wade in the Water; and Such Color. Smith’s 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, and was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The Good Life
by Tracy K. Smith
.
When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
.
“The Good Life” from Life on Mars, © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith – Graywolf Press
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April 17
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1586 – John Ford born at Bagtor, his family’s estate in Devonshire; notable English playwright, who also wrote poetry, during the reign of Charles I. There are few details of his life known from 1600, when he first arrived in London, to 1606, when he completed his first literary works Fame’s Memorial and Honour Triumphant. In 1601, he was residing at the Middle Temple, a complex of buildings which is one of the Inns of Court, the four associations of the barristers of England and Wales, but it is not known if Ford was studying for the bar, or was a just gentleman boarder. Financial difficulties got him expelled from the Middle Temple between 1606 and 1608, when he was readmitted. From 1620 onward, he concentrated on writing plays, and is best known for his 1633 tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a family drama with brother-sister incest. Ford’s date of death is unknown, but is believed to have been in 1639.
Dawn
by John Ford
.
Fly hence, shadows, that do keep
Watchful sorrows charm’d in sleep!
Tho’ the eyes be overtaken,
Yet the heart doth ever waken
Thoughts chain’d up in busy snares
Of continual woes and cares;
Love and griefs are so exprest
As they rather sigh than rest.
Fly hence, shadows, that do keep
Watchful sorrows charm’d in sleep!
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April 18
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1925 – Bob Kaufman born as Robert Garnell Kaufman in New Orleans, Louisiana; American Beat poet, jazz performance artist, and satirist. His father’s family were German Jews, and his mother was from a Black Catholic New Orleans family. Kaufman joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at age 18, then in the early 1940s, he briefly studied literature at New York City’s New School for Social Research. He moved to San Francisco’s North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. In 1959, along with poet Allen Ginsberg and others, he was a co-founder and one of the editors of Beatitude poetry magazine. He was primarily a spoken word poet, and many of his poems would have been lost if his second wife Eileen Singe had not gathered up the scraps of paper he often used, or written them down as he worked them out aloud. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. He finally broke his silence by reciting his poem “All Those Ships that Never Sailed.” After some of his poetry was published in French translation, he was hailed in France as the Black American Rimbaud. He died of emphysema at age 60 in January 1986. His poetry collections include: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness; The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978; and two published posthumously – Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems, and Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman.
Walking Parker Home
by Bob Kaufman
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Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/
Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings
People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s
Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times
Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization
Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds
Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight
Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts
New York alter city/ black tears/ secret disciples
Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates
Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes
Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions
Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground.
Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding
Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears
Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions.
Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/
Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/
Death and indestructible existence
.
In that Jazz corner of life
Wrapped in a mist of sound
His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn
Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams
Inviting the nerveless to feel once more
That fierce dying of humans consumed
In raging fires of Love.
.
“Walking Parker Home” from Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness,
© 1965 by Bob Kaufman – New Directions Publishing
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April 19
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1931 – Etheridge Knight born in Corinth, Mississippi; African-American poet. He was one of eight children in a poor family, and though a bright student, he dropped out of school at age 16, and worked as a shoe shiner before joining the army in 1947. He served in Korea as a medical technician until 1950, when he was seriously wounded. He became addicted to morphine. Coming back to the U.S., he was a drug dealer and thief to support his habit. In 1960, he was arrested for armed robbery, and sentenced to prison. There, he began writing poetry, and some of it was published in the Negro Digest, attracting the attention of established Black poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki Madhubuti. Dudley Randall, poet and owner of Broadside Press, published Knight’s first verse collection, Poems from Prison, in 1968, coinciding with his release from prison. His second book, Black Voices from Prison was published in 1970. He earned a bachelor’s degree in American poetry and criminal justice from Martin Center University in Indianapolis in 1990, and taught creative writing until he became too ill to continue. He died of lung cancer in 1991 just weeks before his 60th birthday.
Haiku
by Etheridge Knight
.
To write a blues song
is to regiment riots
and pluck gems from graves.
.
"Haiku" from The Essential Etheridge Knight, © 1986 by Etheridge Knight – University of Pittsburgh Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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