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In celebration of National Poetry Month, Weekend Edition is asking young poets about what poetry means to them. This week, Harmony Holiday describes how poetry helped her "negotiate the language" of having a white mother and an African-American father.

April is famously the cruelest month — according to the poem — but it's also the month we celebrate poetry. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith says we all need poetry, and even those of us who don't write poems can still learn how to see and hear the world through poetry.

Dunya Mikhail fled her homeland in the wake of the first Gulf War, after her writing was labeled subversive by Saddam Hussein's government. She has never physically returned to Iraq, but she remembers it in her poetry.

A program that makes poems from our tweets / With rhyming lines and smooth iambic beats ... Ranjit Bhatnagar wrote a program to find tweets in iambic pentameter and retweet them in rhyming pairs. With NPR's Jacki Lyden, he shares some of the resulting couplets.

Also: A school will be named after Maurice Sendak; poetic parking regulations; and Amish romance novels.

As a prisoner of war in the "Hanoi Hilton," Air Force fighter pilot John Borling spent years composing and memorizing poetry that he tapped to fellow prisoners, like the future Sen. John McCain, using a special code.

Jonathan Reichert, professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has donated a rare collection of Robert Frost's letters, photographs and audio files to the school. The materials chronicle the decades-long friendship between the poet and Reichert's father, rabbi and poet Victor Reichert.

Richard Blanco became the fifth poet to read at the inauguration of a United States president.

Blanco, a first-generation Cuban-American, says he identifies with the theme of the inauguration: Our People, Our Future. He is the fifth poet to take part in a U.S. presidential inauguration, and also the youngest. He says being selected was a "great honor."

According to poet Kevin Young, the best poems are like the best meals — they're made from scratch. Young has edited a new collection of poems that celebrate the pleasures of food, from "butter disappearing into whipped sweet potatoes" to oysters that taste like "starlight."