Common Threads, baby!

This is just cool. Nine poems by nine Massachusetts poets. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Common Threads! (and the crowd goes wild ...!)

Imagine, for National Poetry Month, the state of Massachusetts will be reading these poems in every book club, library, reading group, classroom, poetry club, workshop ... across the Commonwealth. Download the reading guide and watch videos of the poems read by the living poets.

If you'd like to get a hard-copy version, visit Harvard Book Store online. The cost? $10 ($5 goes to Mass Poetry).

This year's poems:

1. "The Author to Her Book" by Anne Bradstreet
2. No. 1129 - "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant" by Emily Dickinson
3. "The Fire of Drift-Wood" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
4. "For the Union Dead" by Robert Lowell
5. "Horseface" by Sam Cornish
6. "if see no end in is" by Frank Bidart
7. "Baseball" by Gail Mazur
8. "Out at Plansville" by David Ferry
9. "The Hardness Scale" by Joyce Peseroff

And the best part?

The beautiful and talented Lloyd Schwartz will host the Common Threads Reading at the Mass Poetry Festival on Saturday, April 21. Sam Cornish, Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur, David Ferry, and Joyce Peseroff will read the work of Bradstreet, Dickinson, Lowell, and Longfellow.

Need more convincing? Here's Gail Mazur reading her poem "Baseball."