Today ends my 10-day commitment to post a poem a day. It’s also the end of April, last day of National Poetry Month in 2009. I’ve posted new poems at my creative writing blog, Telling Stories. Starting with the introduction, I managed to get a poem a day up there.It’s been a lot of fun. Not only did I post them daily, I wrote them daily. Later today I’ll post #10 the last one for this series.

There’s much more than these 10 poems on the site. So please explore and tell me what you enjoyed. I have a wedding poem called Mine that is often well-received. I posted it last April. You should check it out!

Poetry is a very important literary form that is explored all the time. April, National Poetry Month, is a big deal for me because it’s the time when poetry spills over into mainstream writing and reading. Here are a just a few of the benefits that poetry presents.

4 Benefits of Reading & Writing Poetry

1. Poetry helps you to know things more fully. When I turn things over to put them into verse, I often find that I have to shift my perspective, usually to see more closely. In a poem of gratitude, Amen, I was thinking about how happy the spring had arrived. I sat by the lake thinking of all that was going on. I passed beyond the big things moving closer and wider to see a broader picture than had originally come to mind.

2. Poetry commands your attention. There’s reading and then there’s reading. You can’t skim a poem and get what the writer sets forth for you, which is not the whole of it. The rest is filled in with a big part of who you are. Really, when you think about it, anything you can comprehend is understood from the context or frame of reference you have. Poems leave a little more room for you in the verses.

3. Poetry can sustain good conversation. Two people can read the same poem and get very different things out of it. I’ve had some really interesting conversations around poetry. In fact, one of the poems I wrote called What Could I Lose brought a woman to tears, whereas it made me smile when I wrote it. After the reading she spoke with me and made me understand where the poem transported her.

4. Poetry writing asks you to dig deeper. It feels like Twitter sometimes. Poetry makes no restrictions on the number of characters you use, or the words. However, you work to tell your story, to convey your thoughts and emotions, reflections and opinions. And you do this in verse form instead of prose. One of the shortest poems in my book Partly Cloudy didn’t make it the the table of contents and yet it got a lot of feedback, both commiseration and query of What led you to feel that way?

Keep Reading Poetry

I saved this post for today because poetry is not just for the month of April. I invite you to read verses regularly. Find favorite poets, collections of poetry blogs and more; and return to them to get all that’s there for you. There’s tomorrow and tomorrow.

Telling Stories is where I put my creative expression that’s not work-related. If you should visit, you may find short essays, videos and more. I hope you enjoy my free form space. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

UPDATE: Just Outside, poem no. 10 in the set is ready for your enjoyment.