Untitled, April 29, 2007

I am not sure what it is, but today, on two different occasions my children asked me whether I liked the idea of National Poetry Month. Actually, I know what prompted it.

We have been in the car for most of the day on that glorious ferrying journey that takes you from two steel band concerts (my son and daughter are avid steel band musicians and quite good at it) to doing some shopping for a party later that evening, to getting a hair cut, to getting pas port photos taken, essentially driving the length and breadth of Columbia and its suburbs on a stunningly beautiful day—brilliant sunshine and a curiously cool air all around. And while we have been driving around, NPR has been feeding its many stories with reference to National Poetry Month. Most of it is amusing stuff, and virtually all of it is about evaluating the value of the month for poets. Of course, this is the end of the Poetry Month and this evaluation seems necessary.
I answered my children quite simply: “Well, I like it being around than it not being around,” which is something of a cop-out, but it is true. I can’t say I like National Poetry Month because I am not aware of it being such until someone happens to mention it on radio. I also don’t have a relationship to poetry that is as specific and ritualized as Christmas, for instance. We have no grand Poetry Month dinner at my home. It is, after all, a new thing, this celebration. It began what ten or eleven years ago in America? So it is only important to me in a tangential kind of way.
It is useful because it opens the doors for gigs, but I have not been busier as a reader of my poems in April—certainly not this year. And it has not been my sense that people who have no real interest in poetry get interested in poetry during National Poetry Month. So I don’t mind it. But I am not sure that I have any feelings about it. My children are asking me, I suppose, whether I think there should be a National Poetry Month. And my answer has to be yes. But I also know that I would not feel less respected if there was not such a month. This is not because the respect I feel as a poet is so high and thus unassailable by such an edict. It is because the opposite is true. Being a poet for many people that I am in contact with on a day to day basis, is at best a curiosity and at worst an irrelevance. I like to think they are wrong, but I can’t imagine that having a month for poetry will change that.
Remember, it is not as if April has been set aside exclusively for poetry. Apparently April is also a month for other things. I have been reluctant to look up this matter for fear of discovering that April is the month of the bull-frog or of pasta or of the thong or something vastly more interesting and marketable than poetry.
So, farewell to the cruelest month for 2007. It came and went. This blog has probably done more to keep me focused on the month that most other things. Here in Columbia, April is poetry filled and we announce winners of our contests in April. This year was a good year for one winner, Ed Madden who won the South Carolina Book Prize for his manuscript Signals which will be published by USC Press next year (Judged by Afaa Weaver), and Madden also won the Single Poem Contest (judged by Richard Garcia).. It has been poetry alive, I suppose, but so will next month and the month after that.