Every month, I peruse Google Trends and find that the public has been searching for sports teams, athletes, actors, and political headlines. These are the stand-bys. It’s not every month that folks have reason to google things like radioactive shrimp, but August was a special time filled with magic, love, goofy words, disease, and threatening crustaceans. We’re two thirds of the way through 2025 and nothing should surprise us anymore.
PoCamper Annabelle Roses reflects on the five day, four nights we spent in the Catskills for this year’s Poetry Camp!
“Poetopia” is a feeling of community. It’s when spoken word moves an audience to laughter, sadness, and conviction. It’s when you leave with more friends than you arrived. It’s when your body sinks into the grass, the cool breeze restores your lungs, and the strangers on the blanket next to you aren’t strangers at all.
Every so often, some journalist declares that “Literature is dead” in an op-ed. In a rose-colored hindsight, these articles are underlined with a nostalgic yearning for bygone writers, capturing the “ineffable but all-powerful zeitgeist.”
This summer, that man was NYT columnist David Brooks. There are some valid points that Mr. Brooks makes, namely the changing media and publishing landscape, the shortening of attention spans, and a society that rewards conformity. However, I would like to propose a solution: the idiomatization of poetry into the vernacular.
As the peak of blackberry season begins to roll away and the time of driving summer fruit in from hundreds of miles away is on the horizon, I reminisce on the warm mornings I spent in my backyard this summer with a bowl of fresh fruit. The most notable (photogenic) of the assortment were the blackberries glistening on the sides of the bowl. But time and time again, I was met with this pattern: sweet, tart, bitter, tart, bitter, sweet, sweet, bitter.
July overwhelms me. It’s abundant in every way, overflowing with flowers and sunlight as well as noise, crowds, and humidity. Have you noticed how quiet winter becomes? I long for it. But this is July, and there’s a lot going on. The internet is thrumming with millions of queries as we all find things to wonder about. Here are a few hot topics for July, per Google Trends.
I define a walk as moving at an even pace without having both feet off the ground at the same time. Merriam-Webster classifies a walk as “to move along on foot : advance by steps.” The Cambridge Dictionary suggests a walk is “to move along by putting one foot in front of the other, allowing each foot to touch the ground before lifting the next.” People go on walks for all kinds of reasons: curiosity, pleasure, exercise, even religious pilgrimage. Walking is a relationship unique to the individual. Every walk is different, even if the path or routine is the same. It is a process that, whether we are conscious of it or not, involves the whole self: the mental, the emotional, and the physical.
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably (at least a little bit) interested in reading poetry. You might want to spend an hour going to a reading or sitting down with a new collection, but it’s not always possible to fit it into your busy schedule. As an alternative, here are some bite-size ways to fit poetry into your daily life.
“Find the edges of your body.” K. Iver’s instruction sounded simple. I thought about the faded, spice-red, velvet-like seat underneath me, my back leaning against its smooth, unforgiving wood backrest. The sensation of cool sweatpants falling over my knees and the warm plate of to-go dinner sitting on my lap became increasingly apparent. I stared at K with great intent and curiosity, waiting for their next words.
It’s that time of year. Nights are a few lines longer as the fireflies’ light glows increasingly more succinct. Embrace the change of seasons as a proposition seeped in prepositions primed for new poeting. Now is a page-turning opportunity to prep pencils, similes, and poetic prowess, and stock up on key supplies for a coveted crop of new words and poetry. Read on for tips for back-to-poetry shopping. Don’t forget your favorite notebook!