NationalPoetryMonth.ca begins on April 1, 2023

Origins of NationalPoetryMonth.ca

I began NationalPoetryMonth.ca in 2009 in the third year of AngelHousePress’s existence. I wanted to create a celebration of poetry that transcends geographical and genre boundaries. I wanted it to continue to ask the question, what is poetry. I also wanted to create a space that would amplify and support the voices of those who have been systematically excluded from literary and arts canons.

Community-Support

Through a well-supported crowd funding campaign once again this year, we are able to pay our contributors to both NationalPoetryMonth.ca and Experiment-O, our annual autumn pdf magazine that celebrates the art of risk.

Thank you once again to all the backers, and to the presses, artists and journals that donated to the campaign!

NationalPoetryMonth.ca 2023

This year we received submissions from over one-hundred poets, visual poets, and artists. I am very grateful to all who submitted work this year and to our contributors.

NationalPoetryMonth.ca 2023 includes poems, visual poems, asemic writing, virtual reality, visual poetry, erasures, animations and more by 30 contributors from Australia and New Zealand, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, UK and USA. These are poems of the body, in  protest and celebration, poems of fingers, lips, lungs, and bones, toughened skin, anxiety and survival, of trees creaking, of suffering,  of strength, of rape, of dead starlings, of chaos.

Look Here for Bonus Content

I also invited contributors to talk about the work published on NationalPoetryMonth.ca and to say a few words about their work in general. These statements will be published on this Substack on the day the work is published on NationalPoetryMonth.ca. Part of community-building and artistic practice and inquiry is conversation. Thank you to all the contributors who are taking part in this conversation by sharing their work and their statements.

Please visit NationalPoetryMonth.ca every day in April!