April was National Poetry Month! Though we’re past April, the Outreach Team is still recovering from our awesome month of nonstop celebrating. National Poetry Month celebrates the art of poetry in all of its forms, and here at The UCWbL, the Outreach Team spread the joy of poetry all throughout the DePaul community!
Here are some of the awesome ways we celebrated!
Sharing Our Favorite Poets
Every Thursday during April, between 2 and 4 pm, members of the Outreach Team tabled in the Lincoln Park Student Center to spread the joy of poetry. One of our tabling activities involved giving out pretty index cards—which many of our peer tutors decorated with washi tape left over from winter quarter’s bullet journaling inservice—to passersby and asking them to answer one of three questions on the card: Who is your favorite poet? What is your favorite poem? or What is your favorite type of poetry?
Lots of people stopped by our table to share their answers! As it turns out, the DePaul community appreciates lots of different types of poetry—from haikus to rap lyrics, from Robert Frost to Stevie Nicks. We took all of the responses we got and decorated the bulletin board outside of The UCWbL with them. Overall, what was most fun about this was showing how there’s a type of poetry for everyone. Sure, not everyone is going to love Shakespeare sonnets. Someone might appreciate the rhythm and internal rhyme of song lyrics, and that’s just as valid.
Collaborative Poetry
In line with our core value of collaboration, we decided to show how a team can create a poem. We made some poem outlines and set them up at our table in the student center. Then, we asked people to add a line to the poem. There were lots of different types of poems available to write, from haikus, to sonnets, to freeform poems. People could add lines that were serious or goofy, dramatic or funny, descriptive or basic. It didn’t matter; all that mattered was that we were writing together! Then, we put our collaboratively written poems on the bulletin board as well.
Poem in Your Pocket Day
Of all the amazing times we had tabling during this month, perhaps the most fun was Poem in Your Pocket Day. Every year, Poem in Your Pocket Day is celebrated on April 26. We set up our tables with little pocket-sized poems people could take and carry around with them.
The Outreach Team found short poems online that would fit on index cards. We wrote them in different colors on the cards, then decorated the cards with stickers and washi tape. Then, we made little pockets out of paper to store these poems in. That way, people could take a poem out of our “pockets” and carry them around in theirs.
Poem in Your Pocket Day was a fun way to share short poetry with lots of different people, as well as to have fun decorating some cards. This is probably the cutest holiday I’ve ever celebrated.
While the month of April is long over, our cheerful and welcoming bulletin board remains outside the Lincoln Park UCWbL! We’re already excited for next year—bring it on, National Poetry Month 2019!
