National Poetry Writing Month: NaPoWriMo Here We Go--

It's April, the poemest month, and I am glad to see the sun and plants growing up and reaching into the light. It's just the first day, so who can say how the month will be?

Spring at Trader Joe's

It's got to be official if the daffodils are blooming, big white clouds are looming and--here is a poem I wrote a few Spring mornings back when I still rode the bus to work, through the countryside:

Today though, my brain is slowly waking up to Spring, and thoughts are turning into rhymes and poems and wordy fragments that can be jotted down and edited, hopefully into something new.

And I am astounded that the words are still my friends. Some days I've wondered, as the Poet in me could care less about rhyming words when my head aches, or the fatigue makes me feel sick, or my eyes and ears become so overwhelmed by light and sound. But I'm still here, my Poet Persona is alive and well and looking for pen and paper.

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This month I will be diving back into my poetry practice, and get myself going again. Some of us, back in the early oughts blogging days, used to write A Poem A Day for NaPoWriMo, but I'm not going to commit to a schedule. I know too well how my sometimes fogged-in brain can resist the instinct to write.

There was a time that everywhere I went, it seemed, there was a poem to be written. Anything could inspire me. My phone writing app was soon full of these poems, and I shared them online, on Instagram, on Twitter, or on my blog(s!!)

And I wrote, actually, a Haiku a day. But not in a traditional form. I riffed off of Kerouac and his “Western Haiku” ideas. I do aspire to learn more traditional ways of writing Haiku. But the Beat writers are one of my foundational writing influences. It is through their exploration of ways to write poems that I first realized that I was also a San Francisco poet.

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I'm reading a few poetry texts I saved from my college English major days, and my experimental responses to their instruction will be considered for sharing here.

So here's to Poetry. And to writing it in its many fascinating forms.