Summer is one of the happiest seasons at Tweetspeak Poetry, because it is the season of Take Your Poet to Work Day (or, you know, to the beach). It’s one thing to start every day with a poem (we recommend it). But how great would it be to start your day with a poet? On Take Your Poet to Work Day, we encourage people around the world to take their favorite poet to work for the day.
Take Your Poet to Work Day is coming July 18, 2018
To help you play and celebrate with us, we’re releasing poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox.
We started our celebration five years ago with Sara Teasdale, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Rumi, Edgar Allan Poe, and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (for folks who work at home).
We even released a full collection, The Haiku Masters: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa.
In 2014, we added Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, John Keats, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath.
In 2015, we introduced the Bard of Avon William Shakespeare, beloved poet Maya Angelou, and iconic American poet Robert Frost, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, and America’s poet, Walt Whitman.
In 2016, English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, joined in, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Irish poet Seamus Heaney, and English poet and novelist Emily Brontë, Australian poet and activist Judith Wright, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Because you can never have too many poets in your lunch box (or your desk drawer), we launched a new school-year celebration in April, Take Your Poet to School Week, with some favorites for the younger (and younger-at-heart) poetry readers: Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, Robert Louis Stevenson and the always delightful Mother Goose.
This year, we’ve introduced you to Jorge Luis Borges, Rosalía de Castro and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Today, meet Rosario Castellanos.
Take Your Poet to Work: Rosario Castellanos
Once featured as the Google Doodle in honor of her 91st birthday, Rosario Castellanos is considered one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century in Mexico. Along with writers such as Rafael Guillén and José Hierro who belonged to the literary movement known as The Generation of ’50, she was heavily influenced by César Vallejo.
Castellanos was born in Mexico City in 1925 in relative affluence, raised on her family’s ranch in Chiapas. When the land reform of President Cárdenas stripped her family of much of its land, they returned to Mexico City. Her parents died shortly thereafter and the fifteen-year-old Castellanos was left on her own.
She was active in a group of Latin American intellectuals, and studied, and later taught, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She joined an organization working for literacy among populations in poverty, writing puppet scripts among other things. She went on to write poetry, essays, novels and a play.
Castellanos was appointed Mexico’s ambassador to Israel in 1971, where she died in 1974 as a result of an electrical accident some believe to have been suicide.
Nocturne
Time is too long for life;
For knowledge not enough.
What have we come for, night, heart of night?
Dream that we do not die
And, at times, for a moment, wake.
—Rosario Castellanos
Get your own Rosario Castellanos – Take Your Poet to Work Printable that you can print, color and cut out for the big day.
Post and illustrations by Will Willingham.
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[…] Last year, in 2018, we introduced Jorge Luis Borges, Rosalía de Castro, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Rosario Castellanos. […]