The further I move into NAPOWRIMO, a time when it feels like, more than any other, being a poet should not feel quite so isolated or lonely, somehow it miraculously does. I tried to write it off as my own personal isolation, or maybe just more time to dwell on that isolation now freed from a lot of the job-related clatter that used to occupy my brain, but I've felt this way before in bits and spurts and in the last three of years, always in April. I think it might be that while I tend to write daily during various times of the year, I am only showing off those efforts during Aprils, when it feels like no one is reading (though that's probably untrue since obviously if you are here, you, dear reader, are obv. reading.) Maybe more so outside this safe space, in the actual world and in the internet world, or the "community" however you define it, I guess.
Not that there are aren't more important things happening in the world than poems, not that there isn't a clamor of voices all at a high pitch. But it feels lonely. Weirdly lonely. It also could just be the isolation from other poets physically that the pandemic has wrought, but I am not that social of a poet to begin with. Perhaps it's just the world (the larger or the writing specific that pretty much ignore poetry (or at least a certain kind of poetry not embodied by two line aphorism and posted hastily on instagram.)The bookstores that don't carry poetry unless its ED or the vast sea of white male dead guys every April.. How in an increasingly aliterate world, people rarely read anything, let alone poetry.
At the same time, I feel more strong as a poet than I ever have, more sure footed and proud of my work, but it's sort of like being proud you learned how to hold your breath and scream beneath the sea. No one is interested, except the fish, who don't understand a word of it. So everyday I break from freelance work and get more coffee and open up my file of daily poems and add another one. I post it, and after a few days delete it. I keep writing and publishing and maybe it all just ocean noise. But maybe every once a while it rises like a bubble to the surface and someone hears you.
