National Poetry (sometimes) Month

tyunglebower ♦ April 11, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

We are well into April, which is, as the title mentioned, National Poetry Month. (It is also National Autism Awareness Month, which was probably a coincidence, but I like to pretend the two are connected in some unseen, life-affirming way. That’s another post.)

Poetry peaks and valleys over the course of my writer’s life in terms of priority. Years ago I was always writing it. There have been spans of years during which I write none. Currently, poetry is near the valley for me, though climbing slowly over the last two years.

I meant to release a large volume of found poetry this year during April. It is my second, and by far the more ambitious work of “blackout” or “found” poetry, wherein a pre-existing work is used as a template, and all words that are not the poem are “blacked out.” My Lodestone Crossing is my first foray into this, which you can find on this site under, “My Books.” That was my first experience with the method, and I used multiple sources. This second attempt altered one very large single source of words into a quasi-epic that took my six months to compose, and is taking me much longer to merely transpose into typed words than I planned.

Plan priorities and schedules being what they are, this project has fallen somewhat by the wayside. It will still happen, but nowhere near the end of this month.

I’m at ease about that, as I am with most of my poetry. As bad as I am at marketing my work, I market the poetry even less. Lodestone Crossing is the first book of poetry I have ever offered to the public, and even that is not standard poetry.

Poetry is the one writing world in which I feel totally free to do what I damn well please, no restrictions, expectations, or in most cases, promotion.

Forms are long out of style–I use them. So called “free verse” despite its name apparently still has certain expectations, especially for performance; I ignore them.

Self-consciousness is virtually zero when it comes to my poems.

Of course all of my writing would benefit from a touch of this carefree approach, and I am doing better in that regard. That notwithstanding, poetry is there, as has always been, unless I’m entering a contest with specific rules. (Exceedingly rare for me to do with poetry.)

Not every writer composes poetry. Then there are poets who meticulously build their entire writing world around same. I make no proclamation about poetry’s place in your life.

I will say that every writer should have for them what poetry is for me. If you write, there should be some genre, some format or style of writing you engage without consideration of expectations or appreciation. If you can do this for all media, great, but make sure there is at least one that you can go into 100% guilt-free and rule-ignorant. That embrace of freedom and rejection of convention is bound to help your imagination and vocabulary, and make you more intimate with language on the whole, and thus improve the rest of your writing.

Poet and did not know it? More like a poet, and did not feed the overriding scholarly or cultural expectation of it.

(See, I broke obvious poetry norms there. Ask me how much it bothers me.)