April is Poetry Month: 2025
April really is panning out to be the cruellest month in politics. We still have poetry. No one can take that away from us. I hope you’re still managing to write poetry. We need it; poetry is important (and even mysterious). And maybe it’s equally absurd to not write it now as to write it. May your life become poetry this month in the name of all those whose lives have been lost, whose lives have become harder than they needed to become, who are living with grief, who are afraid and anxious, who are living with unimaginable difficulties.
This past week I became frantic because I couldn’t find my copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Small potatoes, I know, but somehow these days a small thing can take on a lot of whatever else is troubling us. So I’m not using the word frantic lightly. I took apart a couple of shelves on my book case. And quite wonderfully, to me, I found a different book that I’d given up on finding — I ended up believing that I’d loaned it out or given it away by accident — it had fallen behind the row of books. (And Meditations ended up being on a top shelf where I’d placed it for easy access, naturally). The book I’d given up for lost is View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska’s Selected.
The first poem I’d like to share for poetry month is this one:
Allegro Ma Non Troppo
Life, you’re beautiful (I say)
you just couldn’t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaley,
more anthillful or sproutsprouting.
I’m trying to court life’s favour,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I’m always the first to bow,
always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.
Oh how grassy is this hopper,
How his berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren’t conceived myself!
Life (I say) I’ve no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone’s clone.
I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order – gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.
I just don’t want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I’ve been trying
to appease you with my smile.
I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?
— translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh
We don’t want to chance fate by being too happy. We try to appease life, hoping for just once in a blue moon, to be cut some slack, to catch a break. Life can be so indifferent to the individual. To life, we might just be low priority. Relatable, relatable.
Next I’m going to quote from my rickety scotch taped and glued together copy of The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector (the Lowe and Fitz translation).
“I refuse to become sad. Let’s be happy. If you’re not afraid of being happy, of just once trying this mad, profound happiness you’ll have the best of our truth. I am — despite everything, oh despite everything — I am happy this very instant that’s slipping by if I don’t stick it down with words. I’m being happy this very instant because I refuse to be vanquished: therefore I love. As an answer. An impersonal love, an it-love, that’s happiness: even love that doesn’t work out, even love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be happy, I don’t yet know how, but it must be. To live is this: the happiness of the it. And I’ll yield not as someone vanquished but in an allegro con brio.”
A mutual on Instagram, Josephine Corcoran shared this poem by John Glenday recently and I love it:
A Pint of Light
When I overheard my father say
it was his favourite drink, I closed my eyes
and imagined his body filled with a helpless light.
Years later, I watched him pour out
the disappointing truth, but still couldn’t let
that image go: he’s trailing home from the pub
singing against the dark, and each step
he steps, each breath he breathes, each note he sings
turns somehow into light and light and light.
This last one is published on the Scottish Poetry Library and it goes out to all my library friends. It’s titled “Enquiry Desk” by Andy Jackson and it begins:
“Do you have the one
with that poem they read at the funeral
in that movie?
Do you have the one
with that poem that they used to make us
learn at secondary school?
Do you have the one
with that poem that the Librarians decided was
too beautiful to catalogue and classify?”
One last little thing, an ask. The Prairie Grindstone Prize has opened up nominations for 2025 for Alberta Writers. Would you be up for writing a letter and sending it on in? If so, you need my phone number which I would be happy to give you privately :) Just please promise to never phone me due to my phone phobia lol.
I’m in my era of being passed over for pretty much…everything. But am also feeling somewhat desperate as my current job ends in September, as things stand. Anyway, no presh. Thanks for considering.
