Chapin City Blues

I don’t remember my first poetry book. Not even the first poem I read, though I imagine both might have been something written by Shel Silverstein. I have come to believe that Silverstein’s poetry is the gateway drug for most of us. Though despite not remembering where it started, poetry has become a major part of my life.

In high school, I carried these marbled composition books full of chicken-scratched verses conveying whatever teenage angst I carried with me. I still have the collected poems of 14-18-year-old me stuffed in the back of my closet to this day. Each filled with what were meant to be lyrics to a band I was in (never mind the fact that I never learned to play an instrument).

Though to say my youthful writings were not serious because they lacked structure fails to grasp the understanding of what poetry is and what it means. Sometimes poetry is raw emotion scrawled on a napkin after a bad date, or a short note written funeral guest book. It can be inspired by a single moment or a year in the writer’s life.

I started celebrating National Poetry Month on this blog in 2020, back when we were working hybrid schedules because of the pandemic. In 2021, I added the “index” idea so that certain poems could be found easily. Tomorrow marks the five-year anniversary of this celebration and let me tell you—this has not been an easy task to keep up with.

Yet, every year I pour over books, google names of poets (and titles), flip (or scroll) through back issues of Poetry to find just the right poems to share. With work, being a parent, and being a graduate student occupying most of my time, you may wonder why I feel this need to “burden” myself with an extra task. But poetry is my passion: reading it, writing it, but most of all sharing it with friends and strangers.

I hope you enjoy these poems as much as I do.

1. “Zapotec Crossers (Or, Haiku I Write Post-PTSD Nightmares)” by Alan Pelaez Lopez
2. “Back to the Past” by Amanda Gorman
3. “Definition of a Poet” by Jack Kerouac 
4. “Any, All, and None of the Above” by Guy Duke
5. “Birthday” by Andrea Gibson 
6. “The Black Back-Ups” by Kate Rushin
7. “Rememory of Strange Fruit” by Amalia L. Ortiz
8. “Y ¿dónde se encuentra Dios?” by Ana Castillo
9. “lady liberty” by Tato Laviera
10. “Some Things I Would Like to Forget about America” by Paul Guest
11. “I Useta Live in the World” by Ntozake Shange
12. “Midnight in the Garden of Edinburg” by Michael Jones
13. “Dolores, Maybe” by John Murillo
14. “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde
15. “soy llaga abierta” by Beatriz Miralles de Imperial
16. “Queer Appalachia” by RK Fauth
17. “American’t” by Edward Vidaurre 
18. “I Have Never Been Suicidal,” by Jared Singer 
19. “Addendum” by Sabrina Benaim 
20. “Nativity of Love” by Philip Lamantia 
21. “Aubade East” by Rita Dove
22. Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
23. “I Remember Loteria” by Jacob Saenz 
24. “El Mundo” by César Leonardo de León  
25. “The Only Thing I Imagine Luz Villa Admires about Her Husband’s Gun—” by Xochiquetzal Candelaria
26. “Funeral Oration for a Mouse” by Alan Dugan
27. “The Book of the Dead Man (#1) by Marvin Bell
28. Monogamy Songs by Gregory Sherl
29. “To Any Young Man Who Hears My Verses Read In A Lecture Room” by James K. Baxter 
30. “after ‘Gravedigger’ by Dave Matthews” by Guillermo Corona