April is National Poetry Month.

In previous Aprils, I've marked this fact by searching high and low for various favorite poems to blog about. This month, instead of quoting and promoting Czeslaw Milosz's last volume Second Space, I offer you Charles Bernstein's essay "Against National Poetry Month as Such". Here's a taste:

National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally "positive." The message is: Poetry is good for you. But, unfortunately, promoting poetry as if it were an "easy listening" station just reinforces the idea that poetry is culturally irrelevant and has done a disservice not only to poetry deemed too controversial or difficult to promote but also to the poetry it puts forward in this way. "Accessibility" has become a kind of Moral Imperative based on the condescending notion that readers are intellectually challenged, and mustn't be presented with anything but Safe Poetry. As if poetry will turn people off to poetry.