You remember those high school days, right? Those afternoons you had to sit at your desk, defining a “poem,” memorizing rhyme schemes like ababcdcd and reading classic authors over and over?
April is National Poetry Month. This is a time to appreciate all kinds of poetry, to break out of ruts in our own reading, and to look at other forms and other poets who challenge traditional structures.
Below is a selection of contemporary and established poets who have unconventional content or form. Many of them excelled in the prose poem. A prose poem is exactly that: writing which–at first glance–looks like prose, but upon closer inspection manipulates sentence structure, grammar, description and narration to accomplish a thrilling poem.
