National Poetry Month – celebrating its 30th year – draws to a close, and with it our annual invitation to readers to share their work. They arrive in our inbox, in envelopes, in careful and quirky lines and stanzas – shared by readers willing to put something of themselves on the page.
This year's submissions ranged widely in subject and style – poems of love and loss, grief and memory, a beloved dog, a long-gone bar, civic frustration, history, illness met with defiance. Together, they covered the full range of human experience.
That willingness to put it out there matters. Poetry asks for a kind of honesty that prose can sidestep, and nowhere is that more evident than in today's “Moving On. And On.” by Chris Braun – raw, vulnerable, and deeply human, ending with the starkest of truths: you die, you do it again.
Colorado has long understood poetry's value. The state established one of the nation's first poet laureate programs in 1919, a tradition that continues today with Crisosto Apache serving as Colorado's poet laureate. Durango launched its own program in 2023, naming Esther Belin as its first poet laureate and Zoe Golden as its first rising poet laureate, a position open to poets ages 12-17. At the national level, Arthur Sze holds the U.S. poet laureateship – a role established by Congress in 1937 – and readers have a chance to hear him at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, May 15-17.
Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology, released late last year, was compiled by Durango's Turner Wyatt and designed by Hayley Kirkman, and gathers and honors Colorado's poets laureate spanning more than a century into a single collection for the first time. Available to borrow at the Durango Public Library and for purchase at Maria's Bookshop; proceeds support an endowment to bring poetry to rural and underserved communities statewide.
With that, we offer simple thanks to the poets who shared their work, and to the readers who took the time to read it. The poems may be brief. The impact is not.
