MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Time now for more of your poems. And guess who's back with me - Colin Dwyer, NPR digital producer and the curator of our Twitter poetry call out for this month of April.
Hello, Colin.
COLIN DWYER, BYLINE: Hello.
KELLY: So when we talked with you yesterday, you were telling us about a lot of the haikus coming in. And before we move on, I want to play one more haiku. This one came in from @lookatthathair. We actually sent this one to Sylvia Poggioli to read to us from Rome...
DWYER: Fantastic.
KELLY: ...And you're about to hear why.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: (Reading) Love Italy tales from Sylvia Poggioli. An autograph, please?
KELLY: (Laughter) Hard to top Sylvia, who sounds good even reading the phone book, but especially good reading that poem. Now you also mentioned yesterday this - you know, you're getting a lot of haikus because people are tweeting, so they don't have very many characters to deal with here. You're noticing another form of Japanese poetry coming in, too, though.
DWYER: Right. Funny enough, haiku isn't the only form of traditional Japanese poetry that our readers are absolutely loving. There's another one called tonka that we've gotten a couple of. And here's one from Carol Johnston. (Reading) I hold up traffic mesmerized by swirling confetti petals, my car in a vortex of blossom wind.
KELLY: So a tonka there in honor of the cherry blossoms around us right now. Tell us what else has come in.
DWYER: Well, there have just been a number of them that have just sent me reeling, frankly, including this devastating one. (Reading) Honey and apricot and hands like old maps. She died. Oh, thank God, I would think in two months, that summer before the towers fell down.
KELLY: Lovely. Thank you for reading that to us. That's NPR Colin Dwyer, our digital producer, Twitter poetry maestro. Thanks for stopping by.
DWYER: Of course, thank you very much.
KELLY: And keep your poems coming. We want to hear all your poems this whole month of April. You can tweet them to us using the hashtag #NPRpoetry. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
