Official 2009 poster for National Poetry Month

The Academy of American Poets—the founding organization of National Poetry Month—offers a poem a day online and by email in order to promote the reading and appreciation of poetry, if only for the month of April. (To sign up for a daily poem, visit Poets.org.) Today’s poem, “The National Interest” by Ted Mathys, seems, in a culture very interested in criminality and crowds, well worth noting here. Below are the first two stanzas:

We are interested in long criminal histories
because we’ve never bedded down in a cellblock.
With the sibilance of wind through the swaying
spires of skyscrapers as my witness. When I say
cover your grenades I mean it’s going to rain I mean
there is mischief in every filibuster of sun.

We are interested in rigorously arranging
emotions by color as we’ve never been fully
divested of blues. With drinking till my fingernails
hurt as my witness, with hurt as my witness.
When I say be demanding I mean be fully
individual while dissolving in the crowd…[continue reading]