only the lonely
I've written before that April is the loneliest month. As a poet, you would think it would be a celebration, a month of revelry and readings and reaching new readers. Aprils are always an unusually packed month, not just when I was still working at the library. There I blamed the rise and fall of the semester, which, last couple weeks of April was reaching a head before finals, meaning we had a last chance for exhibits and programming that people would actually be likely to attend. Wait too long and everyone was immersed in papers and projects. This was also my experience too as a student, when the deadlines loomed just over the end of the month. This was also typically when I was in rehearsals in college for the spring show. While May was a bump and then an unraveling to vacation, April was always a little more demanding.
As a poet from around 2004-2018, I tried unsuccessfully to do NaPoWriMo, and mostly failed. In 2018, having started a year where I was climbing out from under the grief over losing my mom, I was already writing daily in the months before, so trying it in April seemed a fair bet. That was the first year I ever succeeded, having gotten down a writing routine that worked. Mostly it was just switching trying to write at night to writing first thing over breakfast in the studio. The only thing that changed each April was I included weekends . For a few years, this continued. I had a great slew of projects that had their origins in April's past (I've been sharing peeks of them over at IG this week.) including memoir in bone & ink, a project about wanting to run away from poetry like a child wants to run away from home. They also include series about The Shining, about Walter Potter dioramas, about Alice in Wonderland.
While my writing process has a changed a little this past year and I tend to write a few poems a couple times a week instead of one poem daily, my focus is much more narrowed and intentional than it was prior. Nevertheless, I considered mixing things up and going back to daily writing. Only then I remembered how lonely writing and sharing daily makes me feel during this month of all months. So I decided not to.
On one hand, this may just be a continuation of years feeling lonely about poetry. I remember being younger and engaging in the online and in-person communities with relish and enthusiasm. Those communities don't always exist anymore, or they break apart and form anew. Every once in a while a poet will ask me where they should send work or where they should do readings when they are in Chicago, and sometimes my answers are incomplete or wholly disappointing. I am not sure I know. Most journals and presses have dissolved over the past two decades, reading series have come and gone, bookstores have risen and fallen. All that's left are the poems.
When I had my minor poetry mid-life crises a couple years back following covid, and thought I'd give it up forever, not being a part of communities in the way I once was seemed par for the course. There is a large amount of nonsense in the world, including people who will treat poetry and pobiz like its transactional. Who say and do ridiculous things in service to this idea. I wanted to separate the writing that I love doing from the externals that I don't like. It was kind of the only way to keep going. I blamed the poetry, but it was really the po-biz's fault--the cult of exchanges and scarcity. How could I pry the living bits from the grips of the dead branches.
So when I say April feels lonely maybe its partly this. While the chapbook series and the amazing authors I publish become a community of sorts, it doesn't have that much to do with writing since most of our conversations are design-related and logistical. Outside of a few people strewn here and there, I don't have a lot of writer friends (you could say this in general since I no longer have a workplace community the way I once did.) Social media is mostly dead and dying and not what it once was. Even blogs, despite a resurgence in substack popularity, are also a lonely place.
And this is probably most frustrating thing---because I feel like my work is so much better and stronger than it was during the years I did find that community. That I shouldn't be feeling like every poem is a dime dropped into an ocean or a cry in the wind that gets lost on the way to a destination. I have a hard time finding people who write with the same goals in mind. Or write about the same things or with the same style. Or prize the things that I prize outside the pobiz trinkets and shinys. This is a lonely place too.
In past Aprils, I would get so excited about new work but it would always get lost in the shuffle. Even the coverage of poetry month was enough to make you feel lonely and insignificant. Being a poet makes me feel self-conscious during these times more than others. Should I not have done something more sensible like go to law school to fight the good fight and not be scribbling poems that only make me feel less heard and lonely. Occasionally I see the backside stats of online content I write and it towers over the creative work, even the least read pieces. I can write about a cool DIY or how to clean vintage dishes and the readership is in the thousands (and I've been paid for it to boot). I write a poem and maybe five people see it (and maybe that eventually turns into books sales or it maybe it doesn't.)
I am not sure there is a way past this. Next week, it will be May, my favorite month, and the world will be fully in bloom, the weather mild, and poetry will go back to being unimportant to most people. But I'll still be here, casting those coins into the canyon like a fool or a madman or a poet, who knows which is which.
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