pocket poets
There’s a Book for That: Poem in Your Pocket Day!
April 26, 2017
April 27th, 2017 is Poem in Your Pocket Day! Initiated in 2002 in partnership with the New York City Departments of Cultural Affairs and Education, Poem in Your Pocket Day has been adopted by all fifty states. In 2016, the League of Canadian Poets extended Poem in Your Pocket Day to Canada.
As a grassroots part of National Poetry Month, people celebrate by selecting a poem, carrying it with them, and sharing it with others throughout the day at schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, and on Twitter using the hashtag #pocketpoem. Find out more ways to celebrate at Poets.org
Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets editions are ideal for filling your head, heart and pocket with poems to savor and share. Here are 10 gorgeous volumes, of the nearly 100 in the series, edited by some of our most distinguished poets. Viva Poetry!
FEATURED TITLES
POEMS OF NEW YORK edited by Elizabeth Schmidt
All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes’s Harlem to James Merrill’s Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices.
GARDEN POEMS edited by John Hollander
The splendid poems in this collection both represent and glorify the cultivating instinct, and each of them succeeds in “annihilating all that’s made,” as Andrew Marvell puts it in one of the most famous of all English poems, “to a green thought in a green shade.” Contents include poems on Paradises, Gardens of Love, Gardens in the Mind, Gardens and Seasons, Flowers, Gardeners, The Work of the Garden, Gardens of the Wild, City Gardens, Public Gardens, Ruined Gardens, and A Garden of Gardens. Contributors include John Milton, Ovid, E.E. Cummings, Thom Gunn, John Donne, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Shakespeare, and many others.
RUSSIAN POETS edited by Peter Washington
This volume gathers together some of the best-loved, most powerful and immediate poems from the greatest Russian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here is the work of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky, among many others.
POEMS OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH edited by David Biespiel
Poems of the American South includes poems both by Southerners and by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe through Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey and include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and many more.
VILLANELLES edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth MalAnnie Finch, Marie-Elizabeth Mali
The first of its kind–a comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle, a delightful poetic form whose popularity ranks only behind that of the sonnet and the haiku. With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeating lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle is a form that has fascinated poets since its introduction almost two centuries ago and is enjoying a revival with contemporary poets.
MILLAY: POEMS by Edna St. Vincent Millay; edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
One of America’s most beloved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay burst onto the literary scene at a very young age and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her passionate lyrics and superbly crafted sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them. Millay’s refreshing frankness and cynicism and her ardent appetite for life still burn brightly on the page more than half a century after her death.
HAIKU edited by Peter Washington
Simple yet capable of great complexity, the haiku is a tightly structured verse form that has a remarkable power to distill the essence of a moment keenly perceived. For centuries confined to a small literary elite in Japan, the writing of haiku is now practiced all over the world by those who are fascinated by its combination of technical challenge, expressive means, and extreme concentration. This anthology brings together hundreds of haiku by the Japanese masters–Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki–with superb examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers.
POEMS OF THE AMERICAN WEST edited by Robert Mezey
Here is the West in all its rich variety–the harsh life of farms and ranches; man’s destructive invasion into forest and desert solitudes; the bars and bistros of San Francisco and Hollywood; Pacific surf and endless highways; the ghost towns, the poverty, and the legendary world of cowpunchers and gunslingers.
From Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific” to Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” from Fred Koller’s “Lone Star State of Mind” to Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets”–the West is evoked in all its incarnations, both actual and mythic.
LULLABIES AND POEMS FOR CHILDREN edited by Diana Secker Larson Diana Secker Larson
In this enchanting and comprehensive collection are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to little ones, from Shakespeare’s lullaby for the fairy queen, Titania, to Brahms’s “Lullaby”; and from Gershwin’s “Summertime” to Langston Hughes’s lovely lullaby for a “night black baby.” Here, too, are poems for children that range from tender to nonsensical, from quiet to raucous–from T. S. Eliot to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.
ANIMAL POEMS edited by John Hollander
From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch’en on swarming mosquitoes to William Cullen Bryant’s solitary waterfowl and Rainer Maria Rilke’s enchanted gazelle, from Auden on cats and dogs to E.E. Cummings’s verse in the shape of a grasshopper to James Merrill’s vision of the octopus, here—selected by John Hollander—are 136 poems that provide exhilarating access to literature’s glorious lyric zoo.
For more on these and other titles in Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series visit Pocket Poets
POEMS OF NEW YORK edited by Elizabeth Schmidt
All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes’s Harlem to James Merrill’s Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices.
GARDEN POEMS edited by John Hollander
The splendid poems in this collection both represent and glorify the cultivating instinct, and each of them succeeds in “annihilating all that’s made,” as Andrew Marvell puts it in one of the most famous of all English poems, “to a green thought in a green shade.” Contents include poems on Paradises, Gardens of Love, Gardens in the Mind, Gardens and Seasons, Flowers, Gardeners, The Work of the Garden, Gardens of the Wild, City Gardens, Public Gardens, Ruined Gardens, and A Garden of Gardens. Contributors include John Milton, Ovid, E.E. Cummings, Thom Gunn, John Donne, James Merrill, Wallace Stevens, Robert Browning, Shakespeare, and many others.
RUSSIAN POETS edited by Peter Washington
This volume gathers together some of the best-loved, most powerful and immediate poems from the greatest Russian poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here is the work of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky, among many others.
POEMS OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH edited by David Biespiel
Poems of the American South includes poems both by Southerners and by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe through Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey and include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and many more.
VILLANELLES edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth MalAnnie Finch, Marie-Elizabeth Mali
The first of its kind–a comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle, a delightful poetic form whose popularity ranks only behind that of the sonnet and the haiku. With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeating lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle is a form that has fascinated poets since its introduction almost two centuries ago and is enjoying a revival with contemporary poets.
MILLAY: POEMS by Edna St. Vincent Millay; edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
One of America’s most beloved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay burst onto the literary scene at a very young age and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her passionate lyrics and superbly crafted sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them. Millay’s refreshing frankness and cynicism and her ardent appetite for life still burn brightly on the page more than half a century after her death.
HAIKU edited by Peter Washington
Simple yet capable of great complexity, the haiku is a tightly structured verse form that has a remarkable power to distill the essence of a moment keenly perceived. For centuries confined to a small literary elite in Japan, the writing of haiku is now practiced all over the world by those who are fascinated by its combination of technical challenge, expressive means, and extreme concentration. This anthology brings together hundreds of haiku by the Japanese masters–Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki–with superb examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers.
POEMS OF THE AMERICAN WEST edited by Robert Mezey
Here is the West in all its rich variety–the harsh life of farms and ranches; man’s destructive invasion into forest and desert solitudes; the bars and bistros of San Francisco and Hollywood; Pacific surf and endless highways; the ghost towns, the poverty, and the legendary world of cowpunchers and gunslingers.
From Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific” to Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” from Fred Koller’s “Lone Star State of Mind” to Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets”–the West is evoked in all its incarnations, both actual and mythic.
LULLABIES AND POEMS FOR CHILDREN edited by Diana Secker Larson Diana Secker Larson
In this enchanting and comprehensive collection are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to little ones, from Shakespeare’s lullaby for the fairy queen, Titania, to Brahms’s “Lullaby”; and from Gershwin’s “Summertime” to Langston Hughes’s lovely lullaby for a “night black baby.” Here, too, are poems for children that range from tender to nonsensical, from quiet to raucous–from T. S. Eliot to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.
ANIMAL POEMS edited by John Hollander
From East to West, from ancient times to modern, from Mei Yu Ch’en on swarming mosquitoes to William Cullen Bryant’s solitary waterfowl and Rainer Maria Rilke’s enchanted gazelle, from Auden on cats and dogs to E.E. Cummings’s verse in the shape of a grasshopper to James Merrill’s vision of the octopus, here—selected by John Hollander—are 136 poems that provide exhilarating access to literature’s glorious lyric zoo.
For more on these and other titles in Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series visit Pocket Poets