16th ANNUAL CELEBRATION OF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH 

​FAVORITE POEM PROJECT
How it all began...​
United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky began the Favorite Poem Project back in 1998. It was designed to bring communities together by celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry’s role in our lives. As a result, in small towns and cities across America, firemen, teachers, farmers, nurses, doctors, carpenters, plumbers, factory workers, children, policemen, vets, seniors, etc - poets and non-poets alike - come together every April to share their favorite poems.
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2021 Favorite Poem Project

In partnership with our friends at Conkling Hall, the 2021 Favorite Poem Project gathering occurred online via YouTube.

25 poet-participants read (and sang) both favorite and original poems. And because the event was virtual, participants were able to share their poems from their homes in Maine, Vermont and Virginia, and attendees tuned in from as far away as Ireland!

You can tune in from wherever you are, too! Click the button below to watch a video of the whole event.
2020 My Favorite Poem Project
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In 2020, in the face of social distancing requirements due to COVID-19,we asked  people to send us their favorite poems by email to be posted on our website and Facebook pages rather than staging a 2-hour event.  Each day in April, a My Favorite Poem was posted.  The complete text of the poems appear below:

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​Rensselaerville Library's
​

2021 Virtual Celebration

of

National Poetry Month
​POEM-A-DAY PROJECT

The 5th Annual Poem-A-Day Project, hosted by the Rensselaerville Library in celebration of National Poetry Month, showcasing a poem for each of the 30 days of April written by a local or not-so-local poet.

​Check it out by clicking on the 2021 button below.
2021 COMMUNITY POEM
Remember to Pause, Pause to Remember:
A Community Poem

Pause. Take a moment. Capture a memory.
​Write it down.
Rensselaerville Library invites you to contribute to a Community Poem, a compilation of verse written to commemorate the year gone by. 

On a 3X5 card or in an email, send us a line of verse beginning with the words, "I remember..." and share your thoughts about the past year living through a pandemic. Drop the card at the library -- come inside or use the drop slot -- or send us an email by clicking the button below. 

​The verses will be compiled into a poem to be read at the Library's May 29 Cocktail Party and published on our website and in the Library Community Newsletter.
Poetry Month 2015, friends and neighbors far and wide grew the community poem "Song of Ourselves".