News That Stays News

"Literature is news that stays news," said the poet Ezra Pound. To celebrate Earth Day and National Poetry Month, I'll be participating in a poetry reading on Tuesday, April 22, 2014, called "News That Stays News: Sustaining Our World Through Poetry." Here's the poster!

I'm sure I'll tell you more about it as we get closer to the time, but I wanted to start off April with this good news and these red  flowers. The reading is at 7:00 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church, 211 N. School St., Normal, Illinois, for you central Illinois readers. Meanwhile, it's cold again, but we've got sunshine instead of April showers. And, yes, I'm writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month. Maybe some of them will be about the news.

I'll be reading with local poets Susan Baller-Shepard and Judith Valente and Washington state poet Scott Poole, who is house poet for the Portland, Oregon Live Wire! radio program just picked up by Public Radio International and who writes the Poetry Report, a weekly poem based on the news, for Nailed Magazine.

"It is difficult to get the news from poems," said William Carlos Williams, "but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." I hope it won't be too difficult to get the news from our poems, and that we die joyfully in a future moment, not today.