Every April, both Canada and the US celebrate National Poetry Month. This includes the Poem in Your Pocket Day event, held on April 23, which encourages everybody to carry a poem around that day, and share it with others at school, work, or other places

We invite you to browse through our poetry collections here at Faded Page. Copy or print off a poem that speaks to you, or have it accessible via your mobile phone on Poem in Your Pocket Day. Below, we list a few suggestions for you to consider.

• E. J. Pratt (1882-1964) was a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry. He has been called “the foremost Canadian poet of the first half of the 20th century” and you can see the best of his work in Collected Poems
• Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), is credited with advancing the American “confessional” school of poetry. At Faded Page, we have The Colossus, the only collection of poetry she had published before her death from suicide at the age of 30.
• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was born in the US but lived most of his life in England, where he wrote The Waste Land, considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century, and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which inspired the hugely popular and successful musical Cats.
• Robert Frost (1874-1963) is well known for his poems portraying American rural life. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, including one for the collection, The Witness Tree.

We hope you will find a poem to carry with you on April 23! You can also help us add more public domain works, both poetry and prose, by volunteering to proofread a few pages. For more information, please visit our companion site at Distributed Proofreaders Canada.