I’m sad that I’m not participating in the poem-a-day madness of National Poetry Month. That’s what pulled me into poetry last year. I hoped to discover new ways to bring music and imagery into my prose, never thinking I’d fall in love with writing and reading poetry itself (something I’d always avoided).
Now a year later, I have one poem published online, two more forthcoming, one in High Desert Journal (#11) and one in The Mom Egg (2010, vol. 8). I’ve also taken a poetry class with the wonderful Sage Cohen (highly recommended), signed up for a poetry class at Summer Fishtrap and shared the stage at a recent reading with the poet Peter Sears (as well as short story writers, Jackie Shannon-Hollis and Brian Christopher). Although I read literary nonfiction, I was flattered when a poet in the audience told me he heard a lot of poetry in my prose.
I marvel at how prose and poetry feed each other. Some poems, including one being published, leap out of old prose fragments. That’s not too surprising. What I didn’t expect was the reverse, where a poem draft would inspire an essay. Yet, I recently finished and submitted an essay structured from start to finish much like the brief poem I wrote. I struggled mightily with it, partly because up until a few days before I finished the essay, I thought the poem better. When I finally reached a place where the prose captured the intent of the original poem and did something the poem couldn’t, I felt like I had broken back through the looking glass into the world of prose.
Perhaps some day, I’ll be able to move effortlessly between poetry and prose, but for now, I need to spend some time on the prose side for awhile to finish my ethnographic memoir. It’s almost done. The rough draft is all there. I just need to neaten up the final chapters and polish the wording throughout. For months my head has been so full of poetry, I couldn’t see my way through the work. Now that I’m writing prose again, the obstacles seem smaller.
In all these ways, I tell myself, I am celebrating National Poetry Month. But I do miss the fun, creativity and the comraderie of writing to specific prompts with others. Next year.
