Wagner School Celebrates National Poetry Month with ‘30 Poems in 30 Days’

By Robert Polner

      The Wagner Graduate School of Public Service presents a special media show, “30 Poems in 30 Days: April is Poetry Month at the Wagner School,” which began April 1 and runs through April 30. With April designated National Poetry Month by the Academy of American Poets, the show, curated by Wagner alumna Judith Frost, aims to increase public responsiveness to poetry while widening attention to living poets and to the long and complex poetic heritage.
      The show is presented as a journal of some of Frost’s favorite poetry. For the most part, she has selected works that express the poet’s awareness of shifting social identities, cultural change, and the broad sweep of history. She also plays with resonances among poems composed in widely different places and times. William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 asks how beauty “whose action is no stronger than a flower” can withstand the ravages of historical time, while Billy Collins imagines dancing with a beloved woman in the last minutes of the Millennium, before the past collapses “into a pile of mirrors or buttons.” Both poets make powerful statements that beauty and love are the values worth preserving and protecting against the destructive forces of history.
      The list of poets is wide-ranging and international, including Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, William Blake, Charles Bukowski, Elizabeth Bishop, Catherine Barnett, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others. This show, open to the public, is presented on the Wagner School’s media walls on the second floor of the Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street. Viewing hours are Monday-Friday 8:30 a.m.-7:00 p.m.