How to Start a Poetry Club-1
with one friend or a few...
National Poetry Month is almost here. What a perfect time to start a poetry club!
Your club can be very small. (With just one friend.) Or you can gather a few friends for the inspiration (and tea and coffee).
Over the next few weeks, we’ll share some of our best ideas for how you can start a poetry club and keep it going.
Here is the first idea…
1-Start With the Familiar—A Memoir Book Club Selection
Your friends, co-workers, or students are already familiar with regular book clubs. So, to begin your poetry club, consider starting with familiar territory: a memoir with a tender story at its heart.
We recommend The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life With Poems. It’s an engaging memoir that also builds the foundation for “why poetry” and “how poetry.” Also, it includes extras like :
• how to keep a poetry journal
• how to be a poetry buddy (with a friend)
• how to do a poetry dare (with a community)
That’s the first poetry club idea. We look forward to sharing more!
Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry is not a long book, but it took me longer to read than I expected, because I kept stopping to savor poems and passages, to make note of books mentioned, and to compare Willome’s journey into poetry to my own. The book is many things. An unpretentious, funny, and poignant memoir. A defense of poetry, a response to literature that has touched her life….It’s also the story of a daughter who loses her mother to cancer. The author links these things into a narrative much like that of a novel. I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”
—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro
Featured photo by Aleksandra Sapozhnikova, Creative Commons, Unsplash. Painting by Nancy Marie Davis, used with permission.