April 2011 Introduction / George J. Dance

April

Volume  II * 2011

Publisher:  The Penny Blog 

Editor: Penny

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To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough. [...]
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
           Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Spring" (from Second April)

Sorry, Edna, but Penny and I beg to differ. We kinda like April's babbling and flowers. In fact, that's one of the reasons we named our own little collection of babbling and flowers, April magazine, after it. Admittedly, a more important reason was that April is also National Poetry Month in both Canada and the United States; and the original idea for the magazine was to do something special that month.

What we do is bring you contemporary poetry. Unlike the usual focus of The Penny Blog (overlooked or neglected great work from the past, past enough to be into the public domain here in Canada), for April we publish work by authors who are currently living and writing.

April aims at showing  the diversity of contemporary verse.  We run the full gamut -- and what a gamut it is -- of today's poetry: structurally, from songs to formal verse to open forms to prose poems; thematically, from nonsense to love to death; experience-wise, from beginners to masters with years of practice. There is indeed a wide and wonderful world of poetry online, and we hope that April gives some indication of it.

We tried a couple of new things this year. One was to limit to 15 poets, and give every writer two poems. We held to that as best we could: but there were just too many good writers, too many good single poems, to do it completely. So that was only a partially realized vision; but we think the end result is better for it.

The second initiative was to look for and feature Creative Commons-licensed poetry sites. CC is a great initiative we applaud, perhaps the only way to reconcile the traditional ideas of copyright with the demands of the information age. Some of our blog's non-public domain work is CC-licensed, and we hope to have more of that in future. In the meantime, we are more than happy to promote other CC-using poetry sites.

But that's enough babbling for now. It's time to go look at this year's flowers.