Introducing Poetic Justice: 30 Days of Poetry

Posted March 31, 2018 by Amber in Uncategorized / 1356 Comments

PoeticJustice Hello everyone! Welcome to the introduction for my month long event, Poetic Justice. Poetic Justice is a poetry celebration in honor of National Poetry Month.

Poetic Justice will be full of interviews, excerpts, and guest posts from published and unpublished poets. It will range from today with an introduction to April 30th.

I’ve had this idea for the past year but I didn’t ever really know how to start it. I thought about having a sporadic feature, but I wanted to do something bigger. It hit me that doing something in April would be a great idea. It was quite an undertaking trying to put together this event and honestly, extremely terrifying as I’ve done everything solo. I was worried when I first began brainstorming this idea thinking no one would be interested and no one would participate.

I was overwhelmed when I shared my Google Form inviting poets to join that I received quite a few responses right away. Days later I began emailing poets one by one to see if they would be interested, I was amazed at how many of them were very interested in my event and said yes! From then on, I began coming up with interview questions and possible posts I could write in case I couldn’t get 28 poets. I actually have 29 participants which is mind blowing. I’m so grateful and humbled at how many poets said yes. Poets whose books I’ve read and social media I’ve followed, it felt so unreal. I just want to thank every single participant for making this little blog dream of mine come true.

I’ll be going into why, exactly, I decided to host a poetry event seeing as this is a primary blog about Young Adult books.

Poetry has always been an interest of mine since roughly the 8th grade. I still remember where I was when I wrote my first poem. It had been a hard, though not completely unsual day of school bullying. I was dying to get my feelings out somehow and out came a poem. It was not the best poems by any means. It was repetitive, simple and really dull. It was personal though, it was my window into coping with my life through the written word.

I’ve always considered writing to be the most amazing gift. I feel so lucky that I have been blessed with the ability to describe my feelings in poems and stories. It’s like magic the way that words twist and turn into something formidable, something so amazing without even knowing where they’re coming from. How amazing is it that I have this natural built in coping method? Even if no one ever reads my words, just the ability to write something that describes my emotions so clearly to me is a blessing.

During the eighth grade, I began posting my poetry on Quizilla, later I discovered Allpoetry as well as Mibba. These writing communities gave me an outlet and opened up the creativity inside me. I frequented those websites until slowly, I began not writing as much my Senior year of high school. I went on a roughly two to three year writing hiatus. I came back from it in 2014 and began writing again, this again ceased when I began blogging and found a new creative outlet. I can only write with one focus, it seems.

It wasn’t until I joined Twitter and even recently this past year that I discovered the poetry community exploding on Twitter and Instagram. I had seen snippets of it years ago on Tumblr but I lost the focus as I began blogging.

If you had told me ten years ago that the poetry world would be completely bursting at the seams, I would have been really surprised. I have always had it in the back of my mind that one of the things I want to do in my life and frankly, before I turn 35, is write a book of poetry. It seemed like such a ridiculous thought though.

“It’s 20–, poetry isn’t published anymore, you have to write like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. Your writing is nothing like that.”

It was such a discouraging thought before realizing what had been here the entire time was a community that did this. They shared their work, published or not and built a community.

Over this past year, I’ve slowly been getting accustomed to the Twitter community through chats (such as #PoeteerChat) and reading works by poets. It’s these chats and poet(esses) that have helped inspire this adventure.

If I said there wasn’t an ulterior motive with this feature, I would be lying. I’m hoping it will help give me a jump start creativity. What better way to be inspired to write poetry than reading from poets themselves, learning about their journey, and hearing about their process? It will be an endless flow of inspiration and encouragement.

I hope you will join me along on this journey of poetry throughout the next 30 days in April.

I’m sure you’re interested in the schedule now, I know I am. It is quite the line-up: