“But the sun and me’s the same, could be: / Cap the job, then to hell with it.” – Gwendolyn Brooks, “HATTIE SCOTT the end of the day”
In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been reading a lot goddamned poetry lately. After all, it’s National (goddamned) Poetry Month. No, we haven’t recorded a Line Break yet.
30 days has April or whatever (I don’t care for rhyming), so I’m reading 30 books in 30 days. It is a wonderful excuse to get around to a lot of stuff that’s been sitting on my shelf, to buy new books, to quickly read authors in relative conversation with each other. That might be my favorite part, actually: tic-tac-toeing Zach Schomburg/Mathias Svalina/Joshua Marie Wilkinson/Frank O’Hara/Diane Seuss together, or working backwards through the legacy of southside Chicago poetry with E’mon Lauren/Eve L. Ewing/Quraysh Ali Lansana/Gwendolyn Brooks. That aspect of the challenge soothes the syllabus-maker that lives in a closet in my brain. Speaking of making syllabi, Josh once offhandedly told me “you’ll never read as much as you do in college,” and this year might be the year I prove that piece of quippy wisdom wrong—something I’ve been failing at for the last 12 years, lol.
Short-burst writing or reading challenges are—in my experience anyway—both incredibly stressful and incredibly useful. Keeping up is not easy, but results do happen. When your default mode is “does my kid need me” or “is there a basketball game on” or “one of these days, I’ll get around to that book,” results happening is desirable. Publicly, I’ve done The Poeming (write a found poem every day in October 2022) and a “30 Goosebumps books in 30 days for the 30th anniversary of Goosebumps (whose covers are every bit as rad as you remember)” challenge for Cracked. Privately, I’ve done things like “try to draft a novel in a month (but it’s not November)” or “write a poem every Wednesday at lunch.” That sentence might not come with hyperlinks to visible work, but in case anyone’s auditing, a lot of ink went onto a lot of formerly blank pages. Or, in the case of this month, a lot of books I’ve been meaning to get to are being gotten to, and it’s filling my brain with poetry.
As I’ve mentioned before, what Hannah said about poetry being more than just a practice has really stuck with me. Inhaling this much weirdo writing, this much art that uses the tools of communication but often withholds the promise of communication—it pushes me to push my writing. Writing (and reading) are kind of like working out, in that the more you do it, the less difficult things become. Just like training for my first 8k these last few months has made keeping up with my kid at the playground way easier. Making (at least a little) poetry part of a daily routine feels like something I should’ve done a long time ago.
I will say it’s not all rainbows and frolicking with maidens in shepherd’s pastures or whatever people think poetry is. Reading a book every goddamn day—especially when there’s a four-year-old around and the NBA playoffs are starting—is hard. It’s also a small disservice to each book. All of these demand more time, attention, and thought. It’s not exactly scholarly, this 30/30 challenge. Even if the sheer pleasure of reading aloud in one sitting and letting the words wash over you is a delight. I probably won’t do this in 2024. Maybe a modified version where I only do this on weekdays. Partially because for all this reading, I haven’t been writing any poetry.
Not writing any poetry doesn’t defeat the entire purpose of this exercise, but it does bother my hard-coded Protestant Work Ethic. Of course, the fiction I’ve been writing has gotten better. This is because of the indisputable fact that reading poetry makes all art better, which is a topic I’ll address later and leave frustratingly dangling for right now.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris