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Do you read poetry? Do you have poems that you remember liking but you don’t read very often? Or would you like to read more poetry more often? Let’s make a poetry book to hold a few poems on a theme, or just poems that you like.
Finding Poems
It’s actually really easy to find poems online. And if you want your book to have a theme (like poems about spring, for instance) you can search for those specific poems and find good lists.
Read a few and see what you like.
You can also ask friends what some of their favorite poems are or who their favorite poets are.
Or visit the library for a good collection of poems you can browse (I picked up Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz). That’s fun because you can run into a poem by chance or be reminded of a poet you like who you hadn’t been thinking of.
My poems are:
- “The Trees” by Phillip Larkin
- “Dream Song 14” by John Berryman (maybe not about spring exactly, but about life)
- “A Contemplation Upon Flowers” by Henry King
- “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud” by William Wordsworth (thanks, Ken)
- “Earth Song” by Langston Hughes (thanks Angie)
- “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson
- “Today” by Billy Collins
Make a Poetry Book
Pick a few poems, open a word processing document, and set it up to have landscape orientation and two columns. Then copy and paste or type in your chosen poems. I had seven poems that fit on four pages. You need to be careful to have no more than one poem that takes more than one column if you want to make them into a book.
Print them out. Arrange the pages so the back sides are together in pairs, and if you have a poem that covers two “pages” it needs to be on top, which will be the center of the book.
Fold the pages in half down the middle. I used double-sided tape to stick the inside of the pages together and to stick the “signatures” to each other (if you’re planning to do it that way, use wide margins).
Add a cover made of a piece of cardstock folded in half with some tape down the inside of the spine to hold the pages in (or use a stapler down the spine, if you have one with a long enough arm.
Decorate your cover.
Enjoy easily accessible poetry wherever you are.
Do you have a favorite poem about spring? I’d love to add it to my next collection!