Greetings fellow poets and poetry lovers.
As you may be aware, tomorrow, April 1, marks the beginning of National Poetry Month which was started back in 1996 by the American Academy of Poets. Ever since then, National Poetry Month has been observed every April throughout the country with readings, poetry challenges and other events, including 30 for 30.
Eleven years ago, to help celebrate NPM and to provide a place for poets to showcase their work, I started 30 for 30 right here on this web site. And, while it started as a local endeavor, it quickly blossomed. Indeed, it has become a place not just to display contemporary poetry across the nation but across borders as well. For me, then, April has become International Poetry Month.
This year, I will be presenting poets from Massachusetts to California. And, on the international front, we have two poets from Italy: Mario Badino, who participated earlier this year in my Italian poetry in translation project, and Angelo Colella who was a part of 30 for 30 last year and who contributed to La Guerra è Pace / La Guerra e Pace in Naples in 2020.
This year’s theme is “Dreaming of Dreams” in honor of the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto and the advent of a literary movement that soon influenced all modes of art, most notably painting and the visual arts, but literature, cinema and music as well.
Also this year, we are honored to have Grace Cavalieri, Poet Laureate of Maryland and creator and host of the Poet and the Poem, broadcast from the Library of Congress, as our esteemed judge. Grace will be judging the poems anonymously in a file I will forward to her at the end of the month to avoid any conflict of interest.
And finally, I want to thank the editors at Potomac Review for once again sponsoring 30 for 30. Their dedication to presenting the best in poetry, fiction and non-fiction is necessary to the sustainment of those who produce literature and of literature itself.
I hope you will enjoy this year’s poems and, as always, I encourage you to share your thoughts with the poets by commenting on their work.
Let the poems begin.
Mike
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
Love it!