Shall we make April the month of delights?
A snow is melting (and falling), temps are rising, light is changing, and poetry abounds missive.
An invitation to delight
poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. —Encyclopedia Britannica
April is finally here. The nationally declared month of poetry.
I feel like I’ve been moving into a state of practice or seeing or being in which poetry is alive everywhere or, everything is alive with poetry or in poetry or of poetry. That poetry is an attempt to articulate our most inner aliveness and nature’s most inner aliveness. So it seems only right that the US and Canada chose April to be poetry month. A month, here, in the northern hemisphere, when nature is bristling with aliveness as we transition from winter to spring.
It’s a magnificent, overcast day in northern Minnesota. The snow is still piled high, especially in places where it was pushed out of the driveway and pathways, but I am delighted to see patches of grass waiting to green have begun to reveal themselves. I can hear water running through the gutter drains to somewhere most days. And though there’s a winter storm happening right now, with the days noticeably lengthening, I am feeling some small hopes. Less afraid to have a look outside and take things in.
Is April the most whistful, emotive, hopeful month of the year?
Autumn, my season of birth, is my favorite in its tender and gradual fall into the cool, dark, but having grown up and lived most of my life in the US upper midwest, I cannot help but feel the hope and delight April brings as the light moves differently across walls and the temperature shifts into something more comfortable without six layers of clothes on, and birds start thinking about coming back and gracing us with their song.
Some have already experienced such delights as bud nubs and bulb sprouts, while we in the landlocked north of the northern hemisphere, are still waiting. And though I am each day observing and living in the present state of winter unraveling (or attempting to), I can’t help but anticipate the colors, the sounds, the scents to come! (Those violets I’ve been so wishing for!)
It is a whole thing, this energy, isn’t it?
This time in particular, in this year, in this place, on this planet this kind of energy feels particularly potent as I practice more and more embodying myself through meditation and other contemplations, and I come into joy and love more frequently than I have done before, despite the complicated life situation, and struggling with my neurodivergent brain requiring a kind of care and a pace that is less accepted and difficult to navigate.
And somewhere along the way, I developed the impression that poetry (and literature in general) could only find itself in struggle and conflict, which probably was because that’s how my life felt. But I’ve been delighted with the unraveling of that impression as well.
And it seems I wasn’t the only one: I recently finished reading Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy which has me alight with gratitude, especially in regard to poetry. Apparently at a book signing a woman approached him in tears and finally was able to get out, through sniffs and gasps, “I didn’t know I was allowed to write about joy.”
Gay’s essays taught me that even in the unfolding of grief, unwrapping those moments, watching those moments with all the heaviness and powerlessness, there is also community, coming together, support, presence. Each and every moment we are present is a kind of joy and love or “awareness of experience” that poetry attempts, however ineffectually language can be, to capture and share.
In other words: even the poems that peer into the things difficult to look at are a kind of joy and love (attention is the greatest thing we can give our loves, after all).
That’s what I hope for you this month (and every month): if not writing joy, reading joy; if not that, experiencing joy; and if joy seems too far removed, and if delight isn’t achievable either, maybe just leaning ever so slightly toward ease, toward pleasant, toward less struggle.
With love and gratitude,
Recommendations:
Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy (Algonquin, 2022), of course. From the publisher: In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life’s inevitable hardships. Throughout Inciting Joy, he explores how we can practice recognizing that connection, and also, crucially, how we expand it.
Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022). From the publisher: “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.” What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?
I was absolutely delighted to find that Carrie Etter, poet, essayist, teacher, etc., is facilitating a session at The Bath Festival on The Happy Poem, Thursday 18 May. Wish I could be there for that one!