As April comes to an end, so does the month inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets. And at National Poetry Month’s close, the poet breathes a sigh of relief—
“Finally, I may slip back into the comfortable bed that is writing only when inspired. How difficult it was,” the poet groans, “to have forced my creativity into a regimen.”
“But oh,” asserts National Poetry Month, “how beneficial—to re-call poetry to its oh-so-deserving place in the sun.”
A wise poet once told me, if you write a poem a day for 30 days, you will end up with about 15 poems that meet your “okay” standard. From there, you will cut and bleed and find yourself left with five poems—five poems that have weathered the storm of the pen, the sleet of the cursor and the knife of perfectionism.
Many would think these odds are not promising.
These satisfactory five, however, the referred to poet would say, would not have been possible without the labor of making the thirty half-attempted and partially completed drafts. This is what National Poetry Month, and the practice of writing a poem a day, offer to the poet—the consistency of production.
However, what happens to the poet when April draws to an end? When there is no longer a deadline or specific goal? A daunting black hole grows within the mind when not driven to create.
A solution I propose for facing down the void, and burden, of un-scheduled writing is to begin noticing.
American novelist Orson Scott Card once said, “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.”
Look. Notice. The five or six story ideas are better than what you would have had before.
When poets open their eyes, they see stories begging, demanding to be written. Poetry, current Poet Laureate Tracy K Smith states, “invites us to listen to other voices… and to care about the lives of others who may not look, sound or think like ourselves.”
Observation offers the poet freedom from their own stories, experiences and regimens. When noticing, the world’s natural appeal illuminates the poet’s mind with such a fever that the writing never stops.
This seems trite, perhaps. Innocent, I admit.
However, I believe in a world such as ours, attention is just what the writer needs. How can a poet ever lack creative inspiration, when it lies just in front of their eyes?
Below, we have linked some resources that might aid in the conducting and igniting of the poet’s inspiration, and utterly necessary participation in the human race.
Go out. Look up, and notice.
The Uneasy Friendship of Poets