The Poetry Matters Project
Hello! I’m Gabriel Gadfly, 1889’s “resident poet,” as my colleagues like to say. April is National Poetry Month is the US, and, as is often the way of the online world, you could say it’s Poetry Month for the Internet, too!
There are tons of great poetry-related projects happening this month across the world. There’s NaPoWriMo — a writing challenge that tasks authors to write 30 poems in 30 days. There’s Record-a-Poem, a Soundcloud-based project by the Poetry Foundation that asks people to submit recordings of their favorite poems. There’s the Big Poetry Giveaway, a project that asks bloggers and poets to give away two poetry books this month.
There’s also Poetry Matters, a little project of my own. A few weeks ago, a poet I admire Tweeted that she was sad and discouraged that poetry didn’t seem to matter to anyone anymore. It surprised me — my readers have always shared with me how important poetry is to their lives. If talented and successful poets felt like their work didn’t matter to anyone, maybe the problem wasn’t that poetry isn’t important to people — maybe it was that those people had just never been given the chance to talk about why and how poetry mattered to them.
Poetry Matters is a little nudge in that direction — the project is a collection of short videos from students and poets and teachers and people from all walks of life who just love reading poetry, and it asks the question Why Does Poetry Matter To You? For some, poetry is tied to fond nostalgia — memories of a first cherished book, or a kind teacher. For others, poetry is a way out of darkness — from depression or self-harm or grief. And of course, there are those of us who are poets, driven to create poetry and fulfilled by it. Everyone has their own reason why poetry is important to them.
The project has been live for about a week, and there have already been some great submissions. Here are three of my favorites:
I hope you’ll check out the project’s page on my site to see the rest of the videos. Even better, I’d love to know why poetry matters to you. Record your own video and add it to the collection!
About the Author
Gabriel Gadfly represents a younger breed of poet, embracing the Internet as a medium through which to bring his work to readers.
In 2009, Gabriel launched GabrielGadfly.com with the concept that poetry should be readily available and easy to share in formats that fit today’s world. The site launched with just ten poems; today, it has over 350 and Gabriel continues to publish new poems to the site several times per week. His style of poetry uses concrete narration and sharp images to tell stories; sometimes fictitious, sometimes true.
Though Gabriel publishes his works directly on his website, several of his poems have appeared in Four & Twenty, Borderline, Anatomy & Etymology, and most recently, in Subtext Queer Arts Magazine, a publication by the University of Florida.
