Resolution PAGES: We Don’t Read Books, We Read PAGES

Around New Year, I often seen folks making resolutions to “read more this year”. But after picking a book for January and not finishing it, their confidence in sustaining their resolution fades. By March, they’ve stopped reading altogether.

But what if we shifted our perspective a bit. At the turn of the New Year, I remind myself that I don’t read books, I read PAGES. I encourage you to think about your reading this month in terms of pages. Set small daily goals for yourself. Read a poem. Read a blog article. Read a page. If you’ve already picked a book, don’t put the pressure on yourself to “have to read it from cover to cover this month”. Instead, make it a goal to read at least a page a day. After 30 days, you will have already gotten 30 pages in.

Below, we’ve curated 31 poems of varying lengths for you to read in January. The hope is that these bite sized reads will help kickstart your reading practice for the year and help you (re)form the habit of reading:

January 1st- We real cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

January 2nd- A Journey by Nikki Giovanni

January 3rd- Dawn Revisited by Rita Dove

January 4th- The Lesson by Maya Angelou

January 5th- We wear the mask – Paul Lawrence dunbar

January 6th- Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats

January 7th- I’m Nobody! Who are you? by Emily Dickenson

January 8th- Monday in B-Flat by Amiri Baraka

January 9th- Earthseed by Octavia Butler

January 10th- I, Too by Langston Hughes 

January 11th- Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden 

January 12th- Won’t You Celebrate With Me by Lucielle Clifton

January 13th- Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

January 14th- First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay

January 15th- The Purple Cow by Gelett Burgess

January 16th- Harlem by Langston Hughes 

January 17th- Give Your Daughters Difficult Names by Assétou Xango

January 18th- Bullet Points by Jericho Brown

January 19th- A caged bird in the spring time by James Kirkup

January 20th- Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

January 21st- If I Was President by Alice Walker

January 22nd- My Life Has Been a Poem by Henry David Thoreau

January 23rd-I Stood Upon a High Place by Stephen Crane

January 24th- The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

January 25th- Sigh No More, Ladies by William Shakespeare

January 26th- My Mama Moved Among the Days by Lucille Clifton

January 27th- In the Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

January 28th- Awakening in New York by Maya Angelou

January 29th- A House of Cards by Christina Georgina Rossetti

January 30th- Autumn by T.E. Hulme

January 31st – On Being Brought from Africa to America by Phillis Wheatley