And suddenly I am craving poetry.
Poetry Month is vibing that poetic energy even way up here in the north woods.
I wonder if it’s a coincidence that Poetry Month falls just after super blissed out Pisces season, which calls for yoga, meditation, and slowing down (or whatever your equivalents are)? A season a friend said is all about “esoteric beauty.”
Academy of American Poets claims they chose April for Poetry Month back in 1996 because it “seemed the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry…” That seems random and vague enough to me to make my own conclusions. The non-believers will lean toward coincidence and the believers will lean toward evidence. Either way, poetry is calling to me again.
I came to poetry in those difficult teenage years without being assigned it. But somehow in undergrad, I began to fear it.
I suppose, like most everything in the long, dark years of my twenties, I felt sure I was doing it wrong. Or, as if I wasn’t enough for it with my small-town, middle-class, lack of classics training background (it didn’t occur to me, in my insecurities, that everyone around me also lacked classics training and came from similar small towns and were also more or less middle class).
But as it was, flash fictions surfaced and then essays and then lyric essays. Which are often poems disguised as prose.
A poem or two crept into the fold here and there, I just didn’t call them poems so fearful I was of claiming the word in case what I wrote didn’t look like a poem to anyone else.
Oh, I recognize now that all this is a bunch of capitalistic gobbledygook, not being enough, in any sense of the feeling. And that poetry, like a good long nap, is the antithesis of capitalism itself but, as it is, it’s hard to argue with 20-yr-old me in retrospect. I can only hold her tight, heal her wounds, and rewire her neuropathways.
I have also sometimes felt angry with poetry and its history of being practiced by and for classically trained, privileged, white men and have to remind myself that poetry has also been used as a radical tool to call out that very privilege and express marginalized ways of being at least as far back as Sappho.
I then remember that poets have been exiled from their home countries for behavior and language that challenged cultural norms and oppressive legal systems.
And finally I recall that poetry is the idler’s writing practice. It is the number one anarchist writing act, whatever the topic. To write poetry is to be still, to feel, to observe. These are not activities capitalism would like us to engage in, and nearly everyone would like us to engage in capitalism.
Work is so intertwined in our western world that we ask small children what they want to be when they grow up, as if children should be dreaming of labor rather than practicing poetry, which I read once, they are far less fearful of than I have been.
When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, John Lennon wrote, “Happy.” “They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.”
Of course, work and happiness aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, needs must and all, but let’s not pretend that work is not work, even when that holy grail of making a career out of a labor we love is achieved or make some kind of difference in our careers.
And by all rights, in a people centric economy (is that a term in use?) we would be paid more for fewer hours of work and us artists and poets would be compensated fairly for our work. For it is all work deserving of abundant compensation and we all are deserving of abundant rest, whatever that may look like for each of us individually.
But as it is, like James Baldwin, “I do not dream of labor,” and I will labor as is necessary.
Is this why, I wonder, some poets strive to show the world they are working in as many ways as they can? I don’t begrudge them, we are not valued within capitalism if we are not working, moving, erranding, or performing busyness in some way. (And indeed within capitalism our bills must be paid by whatever means necessary, which is often a lot of being busy working.)
In other words, most have little choice in the matter.
But, where I once thought I wanted to strive to toward a Ph.D. and a lectureship, I now feel exhausted just thinking about all the things poets (especially teaching poets!) must do in order to be recognized in the poetry world AND remain financially stable.
I am slowly working toward other means of earning income thanks to this new-fangled thing called the internet. (Of course, I feel obligated to validate myself by letting you know that I’m working toward income even as I toot the idler’s anarchist horn.)
But back in March 2020, as my university made the decision to shut down, and I locked myself in my house overwhelmed with panic, the only thing I could bring myself to do of all the things I COULD have been doing, was lie in the hammock I’d just purchased and write observations about the blooms budding on the trees, the snow melting, the rain, and the influx and migration of the birds. These pieces were poetry-like. At minimum, they were small things that might become poetry with some care.
I thought then that it was a sort of fluke brought on by anxiety given I hadn’t written anything poetry-like in ages, but now I wonder if it was a part of the shedding-everything-that-didn’t-matter I was experiencing. A coming home. When it came to it, it was just writing that mattered, it was poetry that mattered. As did making phone calls. And watching fitness videos on YouTube late into the night (apparently).'
It just also happened to be Pisces season (just saying).
And here I am again, the snow is melting much slower than it did in Iowa, and I’m yearning (yes! yearning) to live inside poetry even though I haven’t been reading much of it. In fact, until this last week I could only tolerate Chick Lit, Historical Fiction, and feel-good Fantasy with some non-fiction sprinkled in.
But I am heeding the call.
I finished an issue of The Poetry Project’s journal, Recluse, which I received months ago; dipped my toe into Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, which I bought in 2018 (!); and read a few Haiku at The Poetry Foundation website.
I might practice a few to grease the wheels and rekindle my relationship with linguistic precision.
But I’m most keen to know if/how you’re engaging with Poetry Month and life?