In the four years since the Academy of American Poets helped launch National Poetry Month in April, the annual month-long celebration has taken on "a life of its own," said Bill Wadsworth, executive director of the Academy. "It has a place in American culture that has grown dramatically every year."

This year's celebration will feature a new annual children's poetry celebration, in addition to two new events in New York City: a downtown "people's" poetry festival and an uptown critical conference.

Once again the AAP reports that poetry sales appear to rise significantly during the month-long promotion. In 1998 Borders and Barnes &Noble reported sales increases of 35% and 20%, respectively. Independent stores such as Seattle's Open Books and Prairie Lights in Iowa City reported April 1998 sales increases of 20% to 30%.

The month's list of national performances, readings, lectures and, of course, imaginative promotional stunts, keeps getting longer. For instance, Andy Carroll, zealous 25-year-old executive director of the American Poetry Project, is back with a new poetry giveaway. Last year he handed out 100,000 poetry books while driving cross country. This year Carroll convinced Volkswagen to place an anthology of poems -- Songs of the Road (Dover), which he read during last year's drive -- in the glove compartments of the 40,000 cars it will ship to the U.S. this spring. The Navy and the Peace Corps have signed on; each will give away about 4000 copies of the book to sailors and volunteers heading overseas. "It's a mildly subversive way to spread poetry around," said Carroll.

New Poetry Festival

Poets House, the SoHo-based poetry resource center, and City Lore, a center for documenting American folklife, are joining forces to launch the first annual People's Poetry Gathering, to be held at a variety of locations around Lower Manhattan April 9-11. The PPG will feature wide-ranging performances and readings by more than 50 poets and performers (among them U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Ntozake Shange, cowboy poets, poets with bands, erotic poets and more) from the U.S., Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Lee Briccetti, executive director of Poets House, is co-directing the festival with Steve Zeitlin of City Lore. The populist PPG will be held during Poet's House's Poetry Showcase (March 27- April 30), a month-long presentation of readings and workshops that includes PH's annual documentation and exhibition of all the poetry titles published the previous year. Briccetti said the two events will "provide a link between the written literature and the oral traditions of the blues, griots and today's poetry slams."

While the poets and folk poets are partying downtown, the Women Poets of Barnard will host a more reserved program of panels and a discussion called "Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women," to be held on the Barnard Campus April 8-10. For more information, call (212) 854-8021.

More Events and Activities

The Children's book Council will launch a new annual celebration called Young People's Poetry Week (April 12-18) to support poetry for kids and young adults.

U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will host another evening of readings for his Favorite Poem Project. The FPP will feature such writers as Russell Banks, Alice McDermott and Grace Paley reading their favorite poems and providing commentary. This is part of Pinsky's project to create an audio archive of Americans reading their most cherished poems.

Tom Bevan, director of marketing and promotion at the Academy of American Poets, said the Academy distributes hundreds of thousands of NPM displays and posters to libraries and bookstores around the country and has generated "countless" events and major media coverage. And turning to the original impetus for NPM, which, after all, is meant to sell more poetry, for the first time the Academy of American Poets will sponsor a panel at BookExpo in Los Angeles on selling poetry, called "Profiting from Poetry," on May 1. The panel will feature Paul Yamazaki from City Lights Books and FSG's Jonathan Galassi. Each participant will list the 25 poetry titles every bookstore should stock. For more information, call (212) 274-0443.