Some poetry just has to be let out. Jump into our Post It area and read spontaneous poetry submitted from our readers, then post your own poems! We are starting with a few varieties, including Blues Poetry, Nonsense Poems, the Poetry of Everyday Life, and ABC Poetry.

 Blues Poetry
The Blues Post invites you to hang your own traditional blues poems on the line. This part of our site will be monitored by the staff, and we will take out any obscene material as well as verses that, we believe, are not written in the traditional blues form. See our Resources (link) feature for suggestions on how to publish other kinds of poetry on the web.

The blues has its beginnings in African American folk traditions and music. From its origins in the plantation culture of the rural South in the 1890s, the blues continued to develop in the ghettos of cities in the North and the Midwest—such as Chicago, Kansas City, and St. Louis—to which many African Americans from the South migrated after the 1890s. The classic blues stanza consists of three lines of verse. The first line presents a statement that is repeated in the second line, with greater or lesser degrees of variation. The third line offers a rhymed response, often resolving the issue raised in the first two lines. The first blues song is often attributed to W. C. Handy, who wrote "St. Louis Blues" in l900, but the blues grew out of older forms such as field hollers, and call-and-response religious music. For a list of readings on the blues see the 1999 People's Poetry Gathering Program Book.

 Nonsense Poetry
Not long ago, Steve Zeitlin, Codirector of the Gathering stumbled across a l958 reprint of A Nonsense Anthology edited by Carolyn Wells, originally published in l902. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky opens the collection: "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe." Many of the poems were anonymous, suggesting that, at the turn of the century, people created and passed along these nonsense verses for the sheer joy of playing with language, not even taking them seriously enough to attach their name.

The People's Poetry Gathering invites you to hang your own nonsense poems on line — examples from oral tradition are welcome as well. This part of our site will be monitored by the staff, and we will take out any obscene material as well as verses that, we believe, are not written following this form of poetry. See our Resources feature for suggestions on how to publish other kinds of poetry on the web.

 Poetry in Everyday Life
The People's Poetry Gathering is interested in the ways in which poetic expression becomes part of our daily lives. Our legacy of language leaves the possibility of artful communication open to all of us. We invite you to post your own examples of poetic phrases and imagery embedded in everyday life. Our initial categories are Family and Personal Expressions, Children's Rhymes, and Found Poetry — feel free to suggest others.

 ABC POEMS
In l999, Robert Pinsky, then Poet Laureate of the United States, attended the People's Poetry Gathering. At his reading at St. Marks Church, he read his well known poem "ABC" in which every word begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. We invite our visitors to write their own ABCs of poetry.