Paper Mache
Are you ready for some poetry? In 1996, the Academy of American Poets established April as National Poetry Month to help increase awareness and inspire an appreciation of poetry.
The earliest poetry was recited or sung and used as a means of remembering history, family connections and everyday activities. Poetry is very much a verbal art form and rhythmic and repetitious forms made the information easier to remember and hand down prior to written records.
YSAC has celebrated poetry in many ways over the years including spontaneous pop-up poetry readings in public places. With COVID restrictions still prevalent, we decided to stay off the streets this year. Instead, each day in April, we will bring you a poem or two via Facebook read or recited by members of the community. You’ll hear poems by well-known authors like Frost, E.E. Cummings, Shakespeare and Keats and original poems by area poets. The reciters are local folks you might recognize and others you might never have known otherwise. The poems are short so it only takes 60-90 seconds to listen and bring a bit of heightened language into your life and allow your spirits to be uplifted.
Our annual high school Poetry Out Loud competitions encourage poetry memorization, and the Scholastic Writing Awards celebrate students’ original poetry and other creative writing. Each month, we host Poetry
Hour: Notes from the Field with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
(April 7) and Poetry Square with Diane Funston (April 15) and special guest poets. On April 25th, we will be celebrating the 457th birthday of William Shakespeare.
Former California Poet
Laureate, Dana Gioia, wrote, “What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again. Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.” Keep in touch at yubasutterarts.org.
(Paper Mache is a weekly column about the arts community by David Read, director of Yuba Sutter Arts & Culture.)