UPDATE: Poem/a/Day launches - Lansing Online News is (still) looking for poets

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lansing Online News Co-Publisher Bill Castanier loves everything literary, so he was looking for a creative way that Lansing Online News could celebrate National Poetry Month in April. Why not use social media to recruit area poets to contribute a work or two? Through entreaties on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, perhaps we could field a Poem/a/Day.

With that leap of faith, Bill began preparing for the series by looking for some historical poems to include. Many of you already know Bill from his blog Mittenlit, which is about everything related to books with a tie to Michigan. The good news is that poems by Robert Frost (who taught in Ann Arbor), Edgar Guest and Will Carleton have moved into the public domain, so those will be sprinkled throughout the month.

But the real goal is to showcase current poets, amateur, professional and the hopefuls in between.

Contributions so far have been fantastic, and they run the gamut from serious to hilarious, from experimental to traditional. We have enough for roughly half of April, but the important message is to KEEP THEM COMING. Please email us at [email protected] with your submission. Please include a brief statement saying that we have the right to use the poem in our series.

We also need images and drawings to illustrate the poems. And we are glad to provide links back to your books or websites, so that people can continue to enjoy your work.

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Lovely as a tree

Do you have a poem that is as lovely as a tree?

Mr. Guest was what was a “newspaper poet” who wrote a new verse each
day for the Detroit Free Press, reaching an amazing 15,000 poems. He
was named poet laureate of Michigan in 1952.

We want to encourage Lansing-area poets to contribute. We also want to
encourage Lansing area artists and photographers to send us
illustrations that we can use with the poems. Please send poems and
digital images to [email protected] with POEM-A-DAY in the
subject line. Please also state in the email that we can use your
material as part of this series.