Failing at National Poetry Month

Once again, I am failing at National Poetry Month.  Once again, it barely registers.  Occasionally I see that someone is hosting a reading or actually doing a reading--or just reading extra poetry.  Or any poetry.  People weigh in with their wonderful news of books being published or books being accepted for publication, and I feel like I'm in a distant country thinking, oh, yes, I used to do that.

Part of the problem, as I have said before, is that National Poetry Month is in April, which is not a good month for me, and probably for many academics.  All of the classes that I'm teaching rev into high gear as we race to the ending.  I'm taking classes too, and similarly, those classes will be over at the end of April.  And I usually have at least one retreat.

But I do want to remember that I haven't actually failed.  I have been revising one poem, "Cassandra Keeps Her Own Counsel" and drafting another, "Good Friday at the Mammography Center."  I am trying not to remember past years when I might have been creating a poem a day.  Most of those poems from past years, created in a daily rush, weren't very good.  I feel much better about the two I've been working on.

Once I filled sheet after sheet in my purple legal pads.  I wonder if I'll ever go back to composing that way.  When I broke my right wrist two years ago (two years ago this very day), I had to experiment with composing a different way.  I no longer speak my poems into a Word doc, but I'm still drafting them that way.

So, maybe I'm not earning an F for National Poetry Month.  Maybe a D or a C-.  

I am kidding, of course.  There are no grades.  The poetry and process--those are the rewards.