POETRY FRIDAY IS HERE!

I'm proud to host Poetry Friday at The Drift Record for the first time today.

Leave a quick comment with the description of your Poetry Friday post and a URL, so that people can link to your post directly from your Comment.

I started re-organizing & re-describing the posts here last night, but when I woke up to 32 comments and that total had gone up to 52 comments before noon, I decided to let readers link from the Comments themselves. Readers today can go to the comments & either click on the link or cut and paste a non-clickable link into their URL field.

Here's what I will add: It's well worth spending some time among the Comments here today - a nice long browse, with maybe a cafe latte in hand (or one in each hand), feet up (and a cup of tea in each foot...?) Be ready to be amazed, because here is what I see so far (and I will add to these summaries as the day goes on):

14 original poems, many of them triolets inspired by the Poetry Stretch for the week, or Magnetic Poetry poems brought on by Cloudscome's post last Friday & by the 15 Words orLess Challenge. There's a cinquain, a sonnet, a poem to add to the Peace Poems project, an ode to the letter B inspired by the recent sharing of letters of the alphabet. Included is a poem that someone claims was written by her car (very shiny, very red.) Spring is seeping slowly into the Poetry Friday originals - ah, Spring!

21 poems by other poets, ranging from Shakespeare to Billy Collins to a Korean nursery rhyme to song lyrics. Here are poets you'll read today: Emily Dickinson, Charles Bukowski, Jacqueline Woodson, Rudyard Kipling, Dorothy Aldis, Shakespeare, Robin Rose Yuran, Beth Ann Fennelly, Karl Shapiro, Paul Muldoon, E. B. White, Justin Souza, Anna Denise, Richard LeGallienne, Mary O'Neill, Yoon Suk Joon, Robert Bly, Billy Collins, John David, Li-Young Lee, Christina Rosetti and Sylvia Plath !!!!!!!!!!!

Wow! As I say, take your time - you'll find an ode to "the-god-with-the-wet-nose" as well as some bubbles aching for a bathtub.

You'll find posts from people around the world - Berlin to Bologna to a town called Jackknife in the Northwest Territories. Two people posting this week, as far as I can tell, are brand new to Poetry Friday. Welcome! We have a lot of fun here - hope you enjoy yourselves today.

There are 21 books reviewed - some reviews are short, some substantial, some full of praise, and one of them is absolutely cranky (by the blogger's own admission.)

One of the posts is a convincing argument in favor of joining Twitter and tweeting about poems. Other links take you not only to poems but to videos and animation. Others send you to blogs newly discovered that share a global love of books (the International Youth Library), or expertise about writing. One fascinating & intelligent new blog takes a look at "how a poem happens." I'm adding some of these sites that people have shared to my Blogs-I-Follow list at The Drift Record. There are reminders about what begins April 1st (Poetry Month!!) and the month-long projects people have going - the 30 Poets/30 Days project at Gotta Book, the poet interviews to be posted each day at The Miss Rumphius Effect, and Sylvia Vardell's review-a-day of good poetry books.

This Poetry Friday will last you through the weekend - try curling up with it on the sofa like you would with the Sunday New York Times. It's as good as the Front Page, the Arts Section, the Book Review, the crossword and Science Tuesday all rolled into one (sorry if I left out your favorite section.)

What a wonderful week for PF! Thanks everyone for posting - and those of you who haven't posted yet, please feel free to post any time today. I'll encourage readers to click on your links in the Comments, but I will also add to this summary as the day goes on.

Julie
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Oh - and here is my contribution for the day, an original poem created at the Magnetic Poetry site, where Cloudscome was playing last Friday. Magnetic Poetry is a Big Black Hole designed specifically for people who are trying to avoid doing the work they should be doing. You pull words out of a tangled pile and build a poem out of them. I've added punctuation and capitalization simply because I prefer using them - there was no punctuation in the word pile, and all words were lower case. And, to be perfectly honest, I didn't pull words from the pile that I didn't want, and I went hunting around for other little words I needed (conjunctions, prepositions, an "s" to make something plural - they're all in the pile.) That's maybe why some of you have commented that it "sounds like a poem" - I picked, I chose - just like we all do when we write poems that are non-magnetic. And serendipity offers words that float (or are pulled) to the surface.

Dark Glass

Yesterday you were salt.
Steam. Fever. Steel. Smoke.
A slow poison. The one ghost
in my dark glass.
No universe was more vast
yet less young.
Your voices haunted me.

Woman, woman,
you must go
put morning and night
there, above the sky,
like wild animals.