April, oddly enough, is National Poetry Month. Maybe it’s not odd. T.S. Elliot, after all, did famously call it the cruelest month. Or maybe that’s what makes it odd. The designation was the invention of the Academy of American Poets in 1996, the groups Web page declares. Undoubtedly, those folks were aware of Elliot’s description and made a conscious choice and chose on the side of irony.

Its less ironic than it was a couple of decades or so ago when the effeteness of poets and poetry was a sure fact, related in the public imagination to what today we call the “latté-drinking set,” usually with a pinky lifted to emphasize how out of touch those folks might be. And that is born out to some extent by a genuine latté-drinking group of so-called MFA (Master of Fine Arts) poets being turned out by language departments of an increasing number of universities.

But I declare that poetry is rightly a peoples art, a natural form of expression for those caught in the extremes of emotion and have found the cure: speaking what is on their mind at that very moment in the terms dictated by that moment.

To me that is born out by the advent of rap in its many forms, commercialized as many of those forms might have become, which at its heart is nothing less than on-the-spot poetry. Some of its practitioners have now evolved into spoken-word artists, who, we will notice, eschew the term “poet,” no doubt a defensive move directed at fending off the aforementioned label of effete. But the fact remains: poetry is pretty much big time again.

Nevertheless, there are those among us who are awakened in the night by a certain worry, sometimes a fascination with an idea, and begin scribbling on that pad on the nightstand or, worse, get up and work out the puzzle that’s afflicting them on sheet after sheet of paper.

To those among us who fit that description, I invite you to put your poems up here. Email them to me and they will go up. If you’d like editorial opinion before publication, tell me. I’ll give you what I’ve got along those lines.

I do ask one thing. Field test your work. Read it aloud to at least one person. If no one else, then the person in the mirror. Frankly, that will take care of most of the editorial problems you might have anyway. Mothers, I have found, often do not make receptive audiences. But find an audience. One person will do as long as they listen.

So let’s have it. Let’s do it. We’ve got a couple of weeks to fill up these pages with thoughtful and thoughtless verse. I do not eschew dogerrel, either, as my two true readers will attest.

See you in print.