A Petition to Recognize International Porcupine Quill Poking Day: Editor’s Discussion, October 2022

Dear Reader,

Every month, the Poetry Foundation’s permissions coordinator, Meg Forajter, gathers a list of special days: holidays, holy days, birth and death days, anniversaries, national days, and other significant or tangentially intriguing dates. Counting the research of media assistant Moyo Abiona and the rest of the marketing team, we’ve collectively bookmarked dozens of online calendars, like this one with over 2,000 “national days” listed. Meg looks for poetry opportunities hiding inside this matrix, which is cared for a bit like a petri dish open to the elements; we want weird and coincidental new growth that enables archival discovery. This petri dish is wild. When all of us have contributed and the month’s special day list ends up in front of me, I have many to choose from. This is how you, reader of the Poem of the Day newsletter, get “World Egg Day,” “National Sea Serpent Day,” and your monthly U.F.O. sighting anniversary. After all, as this Wall Street Journal post winks, there’s something out there to celebrate nearly every day, if you want to celebrate.

Special days are as special as you make them, perhaps, and this post evidencing work completed is not written to toot our horn (though it is meant to shout out Meg, who does this every month, along with Moyo and the others who contribute) so much as to wonder at the purview of the Poem of the Day newsletter and to celebrate our little excitements. Poetry is traditionally summoned during funerals, weddings, and holidays, but we hope to offer you more opportunities for poetry in the everyday. Other daily poem newsletters send new poems written for the occasion of the newsletter itself, while we send archival poems that match, speak to, shed some light on, or inspire chuckles about whatever “International Porcupine Quill Poking Day”* it is. I subscribe to both types of newsletters, myself, and that’s so I can see exciting new work in my inbox alongside the archive’s contribution, the juxtaposition of which is often illuminating. Some of our choices of “holi-dates” are cheeky, some sweet, some sad, but Meg and I hope that these significances, these resonances, reach you where you are and connect you with the archive–that is, our shared cultural memory–on days we mark together.

This October celebrates three very special themes rolled into one, all of which are close to my heart (perhaps equidistant from it): American Archives Month, National Book Month, and Spooky Season. As I mention in my archive introduction video for the Poetry Foundation, I was brought into poetry by the Raven himself, Edgar Allan Poe. I was a macabre kid (a history I share with my Goth compatriot Meg), and literary haunts both real and imagined captivated me. The archive, our shared memory, is quite haunted (reader: anticipate Leif Erikson Day and Columbus Day among these specters), and we’ve chosen some poems to raise those ghosts for exorcism, embrace, or whatever you decide. I hope that this month, the shared imaginations of the book, the archive, and the ghost constellate in Poem of the Day for you.

Happy Halloween!

Power to the haunted,

Robert Eric Shoemaker and the Poem of the Day team 

*Please add this to your calendar, National Date Maker