I remember
The crackle of the palm trees
Over the mooned white roofs of the town...
The shining town...
And the tender fumbling of the surf
On the sulphur-yellow beaches
As we sat... a little apart... in the close-pressing night. -- From "A Memory" by Lola Ridge
To celebrate National Poetry Day New Zealand last week, one of many events nationwide was "Poets at Dusk" at Page & Blackmore Booksellers in Nelson: "The sun sets and words arise." The bookshop also invited patrons to stick a favorite poem in its shop window.
At Time Out Bookstore, an event called "All Tomorrow's Poets 2015" featured "another vibrant and diverse group of writers from across the Auckland sprawl.... Come and listen as these poets push through the congealed membrane of the traditional NZ canon."
For the Wairarapa region's "When Poetry Comes to Town" celebration, Hedley's Bookshop in Masterton held a "Paperbag Poems" event at which patrons could bring their lunch, "taste some of Jenny Hedley's famous soup and hear the favorite poems of ten people from the Masterton community: politicians, bankers, business people and members of community groups. Some of the poems will be familiar favorites but you may discover some new poems too. You can expect to be surprised, entertained and delighted."
While I've heard many, many opinions--positive as well as negative--over the years about setting aside a specific day or week or month to acknowledge the existence (or absence) of poetry in our lives, as a reader of poetry year-round I don't really have any qualms about these lit-markers because public festivals often lead me to unexpected writers.
This happened last year when I wrote a column about National Poetry Day NZ that began: "I don't know anything about New Zealand poetry, relatively speaking." In preparing for the piece, I read many poets who were new to me. This, of course, was the point, but something else happened subsequent to the column's publication that has prompted me to consider how our world of books, using words as thread, can weave readers and writers together.
After the 2014 column appeared, I received an e-mail from author Terese Svoboda that included a pair of amazing poetry book recommendations with New Zealand roots: Lola Ridge's Sun-Up and Other Poems, and Tusiata Avia's Wild Dogs Under My Skirt ("My Uncle once broke a man's hands/ quietly, like you would snap a biscuit/ in half"). 
More recently, I've been reading an ARC of Svoboda's terrific upcoming biography, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (Schaffner Press, January 2016). A human rights activist and acclaimed poet, Ridge lived what Svoboda described as "a very formative 24 years" in the New Zealand gold mining town of Hokitika before eventually ending up in 1920s New York City. Her friends included Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, while Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger were among her mentors. Hers was an extraordinary international life distilled into striking poems.
"Finding my local poetry community was like finding my tribe. And it's a tribe that spans the globe," said Miriam Barr, national coordinator of National Poetry Day. "When I visited New York recently, I found the same tribe there, bunkered in from the snow at the Bowery Poetry Club's open mic and at the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe's slam. People hanging on each others words, leaning in to uncover the layers. Reading or listening to poetry gives me glimpses into other peoples' experiences, traces the borders of our differences, holds mirrors up to our similarities. It's inspired me when I've been lost. It has recorded the special moments and contained the painful ones. It's what I always come back to."
One stitch leading to another and another still. If not for National Poetry Day, I might never have read Lola Ridge or Tusiata Avia, and that would be my loss. We need all the poetry days and weeks and months we can get... for many reasons. I tie off these threads, for now, with Lola Ridge's poem "Scandal":
Aren't there bigger things to talk about
Than a window in Greenwich Village
And hyacinths sprouting
Like little puce poems out of a sick soul?
Some cosmic hearsay--
As to whom--it can't be Mars! put the moon--that way....
Or what winds do to canyons
Under the tall stars...
Or even
How that old roué, Neptune,
Cranes over his bald-head moons
At the twinkling heel of a sky-scraper.
--Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)