Earn Your Poetic License

13 THINGS

- Sarah Chassé

1 SPRING IS prime time for poetry, and not just because writers have long been inspired by April's sweet showers or the darling buds of May. UNESCO's annual World Poetry Day is March 21, and April is National Poetry Month in the United States and Canada. But you can celebrate poetry in any season; the largest poetry event in North America, the Dodge Poetry Festival, is held every other fall in New Jersey.

2 POETRY IS an ancient art formin fact, it predates prose and literacy itself. Even before we could read or write, people were reciting and singing verses to preserve and pass down history, genealogy, and law. Early agricultural societies also likely chanted spells or prayers for bountiful harvests.

3 THE WORLD'S oldest surviving printed poem is The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed 4,000 years ago in what is now Iraq and Syria. Scratched onto clay tablets in wedge-shaped characters called cuneiform, the mythic tale of the warrior king Gilgamesh describes a huge flood similar to the one in the Bible, even including a Noah-like character and an ark.

4 IN 15TH-CENTURY Scotland, one way duke it out with your archenemy was called flyting, a verbal showdown in verse-in essence, a medieval rap battle full of insults and boasting. While flyting went out of fashion after the Middle Ages, players of the 2020 video game Assassin's Creed: Valhalla can still fling taunting rhymes at virtual foes such as Fergal the Faceless and Chadwick, Monger of Gossip.