national poetry month begins tomorrow!

this year is the 10th anniversary of national poetry month in canada (and 15th anniversary in the united states), and as such i will be posting a poem by a canadian poet (or two) each day of april. you can find out more here. to quote john steffler, parliamentary poet laureate:

We live inside language, shape and share ourselves with it and use it to handle the surrounding world. In an atmosphere of job-talk, technical jargon, sales pitches, sound bites, bureaucratese and grocery-store chitchat we get mental asthma, we shrink to anaemic fragments. Poetry, with its fireman’s axe, comes to the rescue, opening doors and windows we’d forgotten we had, reviving words slumped in heaps in the basement of our mind, and those resuscitated words are oxygen in our blood. How good it feels to have depths and energy, to share in the hungers and insights poetry radiates. Poetry is language fully alive, excited language, which conveys and generates an excited experience of life.