April is National Poetry Month, and as usual, we are celebrating it on the LR Blog with two new special projects.
Digital Broadsides for National Poetry Month
Whereas in the past, we’ve run a prompt contest during April, this year, we’ve decided to do something a little different. Because, in our view, National Poetry Month is as much about encouraging the reading of poetry as it is about encouraging the writing of poetry, we wanted to produce a project that would enable the sharing of Asian American poetry beyond the confines of our magazine and blog. To that end, we’re thrilled to be able to announce our very first series of Digital Broadsides. Every Friday during the month of April, in lieu of a regular prompt, we’ll be offering a free, downloadable broadside featuring a poem that’s appeared in a past issue of LR. Each broadside has been designed by a different Asian American artist (most of whom are also poets and LR contributors), and will be offered in two different formats: as a desktop wallpaper, which we hope will inspire you to write each time you open your computer, and as an 8.5 x 11 printable .PDF, which we hope you’ll print out, post, and share. You can look out for the first of the series—featuring poet/artist Debbie Yee‘s design for R.A. Villanueva’s poem “Vanitas” (from Issue 4)—this Friday, when we’ll release it on the blog.
Pocket Broadsides on Tumblr
The Pocket Broadsides project (about which I wrote extensively in my AWP reflection post) is now on Tumblr! Since many of the Pocket Broadsides are miniature poems, we thought that April would be the perfect time to launch an online archive of the project. Starting today, we will be posting images of up to two pieces a week—of both the Pocket Broadsides we brought to AWP (in serial order), and the visitor-written pieces that we received in exchange. The series kicks off with Pocket Broadside #1, a short poem by LR Issue 1 contributor, Vanni Taing. At least through the month of April, we’ll be posting notices on the LR blog each time we post a new poem to Tumblr, but to read each Pocket Broadside as soon as it’s released, please add pocketbroadsides.tumblr.com to your list of RSS subscriptions. If you’re on Tumblr yourself, please follow us and re-post!
* * *
That’s all of our special announcements for April. We hope you’ll join us in helping to spread the word about Asian American poetry this month—both through the Digital Broadsides and by linking to and re-posting the Pocket Broadsides as they appear on Tumblr.
Do you have any special celebrations or project planned for National Poetry Month? We’d love to hear about them. Drop us a line in the comments or via e-mail. If we like your project and you’re documenting it online, we’ll link to it on Facebook or Twitter, and maybe even post about it here!