“April is the cruelest month.” — T.S. Eliot

Cruel April did not look kindly on poetry lovers in Liberty recently. But local bards slogged through the slushy streets and persistent chill to read aloud in the Round Room of The Oracle Bookstore during its 24-hour Poetry Festival on April 4 and 5. And local folk came out to hear them.

This is National Poetry Month. In 1996, the Academy of American Poets launched the American Poetry and Literacy Project to encourage Americans to engage with poetry and to support publishers and booksellers in their efforts to expand the universe of readers of the genre, and publish more poetry. In our community, it seems to be working.

Poems were plumbed out of forgotten files or wrung from old love letters and handmade chap books. There were products of professional, published writers and the nascent ramblings of adolescent angst. But this was no contest. It was a celebration of life and Liberty with a capital L, a time to commune with neighbors and strangers and, for some, to take another leap of faith into the public eye.

The theme of this year’s poetry project is “Poetry in Your Community.” The academy’s website (www.poets.org) has links to poetry calendars all over the U.S. The number and scope of venues for the art form should be encouraging to poetry lovers. In 1998, project director Andrew Carroll spent the month of April driving from New York City to California, on a decidedly quirky route, distributing 100,000 free books of poetry. The online journal of his journey, liberally illustrated, is its own genre of literature.

Poetry month got me thinking about the importance of poetry in my own life. As a child, I spent days recovering from scarlet fever in the land of counterpane with my beautifully illustrated “Child’s Garden of Verses” by Robert Louis Stevenson. I remember the feeling of wonder reading “My Shadow” as a second-grader. It was my introduction to the world of ideas being expressed through language.

Another poem, “Bed In Summer,” made me think about the changing light of seasons. It sparked questions bordering on the scientific like, “Why is it dark when I wake up and light when I go to bed, Mommy?” That book was my dearest friend in those days and in many others, through chicken pox and measles, strep throat and broken bones. I arranged my bed to look like the illustrations, beautiful color plates by Jesse Wilcox Smith that I perused dreamily.

Later, the recordings of e.e. cummings and W.H. Auden would share the record shelf in my teenaged bedroom with The Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane. Of course, as every self-respecting teen, I wrestled my muse to the depths of despair more than once. But the voices of poets reading, especially those two resonant voices, guided me through difficult times.

On a visit to Thoor Ballylee, Yeats’ castle hideaway in County Sligo, I felt the distinct impression of deja vu and convinced myself I had really been there, in the master’s presence, in another time.

When I had children of my own to read to, “Now We Are Six” by A.A. Milne would have us laughing and crying out loud, children and parents alike. Our standard for rhyming was always Dr. Seuss. Nobody did it better.

Poetry is a force in my life now, as it has always been. I can’t imagine a world without it. But there are folk who keep their distance from the stuff, thinking it too refined or obscure. It is for them that April calls, slush and all.