We’ve
arrived at the last day of National Poetry Month (happy NaPoMo, belatedly!),
and another 30/30 project has come and gone.
The 2016 edition was no different
than any other year for me. I took on too many projects, both writing poems and
reviewing poetry releases. All across the Internet, poetry publishers offered
fascinating daily features and prompts, but there were so many that I had a
hard time keeping up with them. Add in an urgent family medical crisis, some
unexpected travel, and a bout of depression, and the picture comes clear. I
didn’t quite manage to do all that I set out to accomplish.
Each year,
I make grand plans to honor and promote poetry during the month of April. Among
those plans is the writing of a daily poem, and that is a personal commitment I
really enjoy. When I’m living life the way I want to, rather than working too
hard in order to make ends meet, I do have a daily writing habit, and if I’m
not working on a larger project, it’s not unusual for a small poem to result
from each day’s efforts.
A 30/30
project—that is, dedicating oneself to writing a poem per day for thirty
straight days—can be invigorating for an artist, and it’s definitely fun to
look back on a successful effort and mark the accomplishment. In recent years, I
completed two 30/30 projects for Tupelo Press as part of their ongoing
fundraising series, and work from those two very productive months is included
in both of my soon-to-be-published poetry collections. Creatively, this small,
pleasurable source of pressure is good for me.
But as a
way of celebrating National Poetry Month, I wonder if we would be better served
to turn our attention outward, instead of inward, and to celebrate other poets’
work, rather than generating more of our own.
This is the
twentieth year for National Poetry Month, sponsored by the Academy of American
Poets. On its website, the Academy offers a list of goals for the month-long
celebration, and I notice that all of them seem to focus on reading, instead of
writing, poetry.
Lord knows poetry needs a little
help. Even I find myself reaching more often for the comparative ease of fiction,
and most readers avoid poetry altogether, and perhaps never even encounter verse
at all, whether online or on a shelf.
In recent
days, I’ve heard a few 30/30 participants seek clarification about whether
their poems from the project should be regarded as published if they’ve been
posted on a website or in social media. It’s a tricky question, and the answer
has a lot to do with scope.
If you post
your poem on your Facebook page for your five hundred friends to see, you
could probably regard the work as unpublished. If you have five thousand
friends (the maximum number allowed), and you’re trying to be published in a
print journal with a print run of eight hundred or a thousand, it is awfully
hard to make the case that you have not already had your work made public for
an audience—a larger audience than most print journals could hope to provide.
When a
literary organization posts your work on a website, as some do, that work is
published. Sometimes the organization removes the posts after a period of
time—maybe after the month is through—and the evidence disappears. But if you
are asked later by a journal to sign a contract declaring the work to be
unpublished, you face a bit of a conundrum. The work was indeed published—from
the Latin publicare, “made
public”—even if it later disappeared.
My
philosophy? We should write more poems and not fret about the status of a
month’s work. We have more months.
A lot of
people throw their heart and soul into daily poetry projects during National
Poetry Month. I love reading each day’s poem, and I enjoy sharing mine.
Sometimes I look back at poems I’ve produced and I wonder what I was thinking,
writing or sharing such a mess. This, though, is what makes every April crackle
and buzz with energy. It can be fun to put ego aside and just share in the
creative process for a bit.
To reach
this goal of building a readership for poetry, though, I’ll bet we can do
better. We can share those poems we love and that move us so that perhaps other
readers will catch the bug and begin to look for meaning in poems, too. There
is nothing more stunning than that poem that speaks directly to us and reminds
us we’re all connected.
It’s so strange to offer up a
single month to something that is the driving force in my life every single
day. I love the communal nature of National Poetry Month, and I will always
jump in with both feet. But I am living a National Poetry Life, and I cherish the
work and company of fellow poets every day of the year.
Are you with me? If so, here is our
challenge for NaPoLife: Let’s continue to be dedicated to, or even obsessed by,
poetry. Perhaps we might write something longer—apply days or even weeks of
concentration to a single poem and see where it takes us. And we can read
poetry, and share poems, and promote the work of poets we admire.
We can build audiences for poetry
every day of the year, and in doing so, we can transform the lives and spirits
of people we love. It’s a profoundly worthy lifelong mission.