April’s come and gone, we’re in the thick of May, and I’ll bet there are a lot of folks who don’t know we just missed National Poetry Month. It’s easy to get caught up in the change from chilly spring to the first tastes of summer, but doesn’t poetry have more in common with the changing of the seasons than we think? Doesn’t it provoke a change, a transformation inside of us?

I’m reminded of this Robert Louis Stevenson poem:

Here I wander in April
Cold, grey-headed; and still to my
Heart,...