30 Days, 30 Poems: Find YOUR Poem

30 Days, 30 Poems is about finding YOUR poem

Think back to the last time you really connected with a poem. You felt like a poem had been written just for you. Maybe you read that poem over and over. Maybe parts of it came back to you like a mantra in difficult times. Maybe you even had a line or two tattooed on your body. What if you had a whole month where you could share YOUR poem with others and they could share THEIR poem with you?

You might find a new poem to love. You might even make a new friend. And everyone knows poem-friends are the friends you keep for life.

How to find YOUR poem

A lot of the poetry we read comes from the same places: London, New York, Los Angeles, and maaaayyyybe Paris and Rome and Dublin. Maybe. And a lot of the poets come from the same place: usually men, usually upper class or upper-middle class, usually of European extraction. If YOUR poem was written somewhere else, how are you going to find it? How would you even know where to look for it?

One way we have of helping you to find YOUR poem is to bring together a selection of poems from all over the world. So that’s what we’ll be doing in April, which is National Poetry Month, with our 30 Days, 30 Poems project. We call on input from our community of readers and collaborators (that’s where you come in!) to submit their favorite poems–curated by the 2 Rules team–in the hopes that somewhere among those thirty, you can find YOUR poem. And you can help someone else find THEIRS.

So How does it Work?

Each day in April, we share a poem along with some thoughts about the poem. Some of the poems are chosen by the 2 Rules team and others are suggested to us by readers, visitors, friends or members of the 2 Rules community. Our project has three goals:

• To get people who might not otherwise read a poem to read a poem.
• To get people who might otherwise read only the canonical (usually white, male) voices to read a bit deeper and a bit broader. Maybe read someone else from the same era or movement they hadn’t tried, or even heard of, before. Maybe you’ve read T. S. Eliot but not H.D., for example. Maybe you’ve read Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, but not Gregory Corso or Diane DiPrima or Amiri Baraka.
• To introduce poets who are not ‘canonical’ in the traditional sense but are no less brilliant… and sometimes more.

What should I Do Next?

Check back with us every day during the month of April to see the new poem. But until then…

We need your suggestions.

We want to share the poetry that you love. Maybe it’s something that we also love. Maybe it’s by a poet we’ve never heard of before, and whose work we’ll fall in love with. Maybe it’s a classic poem that you have returned to again and again for comfort. Whatever it is, if it’s meaningful to you, then we want you to share that with us, and to help you share it with the rest of our community. Use our nomination form to share with us the poetry you want us to highlight. Before you get started, there are a few rules to follow.

1. The poem must be available online for us to link to. It must not be behind a paywall. A big poetry site like poetryfoundation.org or poets.org is fine.
2. You must have the rights to share the work, or it must be in the public domain.
3. The poem must be either in English or have an English translation available. (You can provide your own translation if one is not already available.)

Nomination Form

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