Special Edition: It’s National Poetry Month! 

Dear Listeners, 

Happy National Poetry Month! We on the Commonplace team are so excited to share some ways that you all can connect with the poetry community this month. Inside this newsletter, you’ll find a compiled list of opportunities to submit your own writing, workshops and events you can attend, and some of our own poetry recommendations!

Books and accessibility have been a major topic of focus in recent months. There have been budget cuts to library funding, books banned from  schools, and lessened hours at many library branches. The best thing we can do is continue to use the resources available to us at our local libraries. This April, the New York Public Library has a variety of events to attend including Poetry Writing Workshops, open mics, and a special edition of Books & Banter for National Poetry Month. 

The New York Society Library also has an exciting opportunity to record yourself reading a poem to be featured in their month-long celebration! Poets.org will be hosting Poetry & the Creative Mind to close out the month, and they have a wonderful list of ways that everyone can celebrate National Poetry Month! You can attend the Couplet Reading Series: National Poetry Month Edition and learn more about their amazing lineup here! To celebrate Arab American Heritage Month, which also comes along each April, The Poetry Project will be hosting the New York Arab Festival!

Here is a list of FREE submission opportunities if you are a writer yourself: 

• Frontier Poetry: New Voices poetry category for emerging writers

• Palette Poetry: Featured Poetry submissions are always open & always free

• Same Faces Collective: Spring/Summer Issue Submissions open April 15th 

• Door is a Jar: Looking for submissions for their print and digital publication.

• Rejected Lit Magazine: Accepts submissions via email

• Acumen: A literary journal publishing poetry & prose

• Letter Review: Open for submissions all year round 

• Thrush Poetry Journal: Established and new poets are encouraged to submit. 

• Ghost City Review: Accepting submissions via email 

• Rattle: General submissions are open year round 

I asked members of the Commonplace team to share a poetry recommendation for us, and here is what Rachel had to say: 

In addition to the books I've included in the Reading with Rachel syllabus, I'd love to recommend Playing Monster :: Seiche by Diana Arterian. The author sent me a copy of her book YEARS ago and I found it a few months ago, read the first few pages and couldn't put it down. Poetry doesn't "expire" the way other kinds of writing sometimes does. Playing Monster :: Seiche reminds me formally and perhaps tonally of Maggie Nelson's Jane (a book I also love) but handles violent content matter and the use of primary sources differently than Nelson does in Jane. Arterian's book helped me figure out something about the novel I'm writing. I have also sent copies of it as gifts to two friends who also loved it.

Christine Larusso also gave us a great recommendation: 

I've been working through all of Sandra Simonds books (thanks to Rachel's recommendation, and after seeing Sandra read at AWP Seattle) but I have read Triptychs three times since I read it while I was at the Storyknife residency in Alaska—that was last May. Simonds' book gives a voice to the malaise, depression, never-going-back to the past (and was the past worth going back to?) that we all felt during and right after the COVID years, a sharp spear thrown down a dark hallway that keeps wondering, what now? In this fascist, capitalist state, what now? It's hypnotic.

Rachel will also be reading at NYU on April 5th and we would be so happy to see some of you in attendance. You’ll need to RSVP in advance, though, which you can do here. 

As always, I would encourage you to tune in to the latest episode of Commonplace wherever you stream podcasts and consider signing up for a Reading with Rachel session! We have a fabulous lineup of conversations with poets coming up:

• In April, we’ll welcome Eugenia Leigh to discuss her book of poetry Bianca

• Sabrina Orah Mark will join us in May—her latest is called Happily

• For June, Rachel will discuss her own book, SoundMachine

• Finally, in July, we’ll have Brenda Shaughnessey visit to talk about her collection, Tanya

​​If you’d like to know more about Reading with Rachel and other Commonplace School classes, check out our new website: commonplace.today where you’ll also find all Commonplace episodes, extra resources for each episode and transcripts for almost every episode! 

Thank you for reading and we hope that this list of resources was helpful! Have a great National Poetry Month and thank you for being a part of the Commonplace community! 

If you’re not a Patron yet, please consider signing up to become one—there are a lot of bonus materials that we release with each episode. If you can’t afford to become a Patron, we completely understand—could you, instead, share this episode with a poetry lover in your life?

With love,

Lola Anaya