April (Llewd sing goddamn!) is Poetry Month!

Here's a little column from Garrison Keillor to get you thinking:

If you were very ambitious, you could take off from Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” and rewrite that. The first eight lines are about how dreary and hopeless you feel, the last six about how you feel exalted by her love. Simple. Keep the rhymes — “eyes, cries, state, fate, hope, scope, possessed, the great Midwest” — and replace the rest.

Write the poem in black ink on a sheet of white paper — poems should never be sent by e-mail and never never never text a poem — hand it to her and as she reads it, put one hand on her shoulder so that you’re right there when she turns with tears in her eyes to embrace you and forgive you for every way you’ve messed up her life. This is the power of poetry. Poets get the girl.

Football heroes get concussions or need hip replacements. My classmates who played football are walking with canes and moaning when they sit down and they find it hard to figure out the 10 percent tip at lunch. We poets go sashaying along, perpetually 17, lost in wonder at the ordinary, astonished by streetlights, in awe at lawn ornaments, bedazzled by baristas releasing steam into milk for the lattes.

This is what you learn during Poetry Month. You may lose the vote, fall into debt, suffer illness and remorse, feel lost in the crowd, and yet there is in language, everyday language, a source of such sweet delight that when you turn it to a good purpose, two gentle arms may reach around your neck, just as is happening to me right now, and a familiar voice speaks the words I long to hear and my heart is going like mad and yes, I say, yes I will Yes.

Well, some of all that isn't entirely so. I have emailed poems myself and sometimes got the girl--and sometimes the guy--although some guys never quite get girls that write poetry, and I have never quite understood why (I married a man who appreciates poetry and Whee! The difference to me!) I'm also not perpetually 17, but was born at about 45 and am forever finding newer layers to scrape down in palimpsest of our cultural archaeology, while adapting my discoveries to the Nova Terre we currently enjoy. But poetry, not philosophy or religion, is my refuge, as rock and roll is the religion and the law of Ozzy Osbourne. And poetry, like rock and roll, will never die.

All that being unnecessarily said, for this Poetry month I am dedicating myself to writing more poetry as, by my count, I have shamefully tapered off from my twenties when I was writing it on the reg. (Not all of it was especially good--of course.) I'd like to see a little renaissance here on DU. Talk about the Mean Tangerine who juiceless plays at leading with his truthless ways. Adopt women's rights, or animals, or racial justice. Find your itch--scratch it onto paper or digitalize it. Make art and weaponize it. Graffito it on TP to make people uncomfortable wiping their asses. Stick it under windshield wipers. Tuck love notes under coffee cups of people you know, or don't. Don't be creepy--but let words be your words and be the words that are you.

Send a strongly written poem to the editor of the paper of record. Let your congress critter know the situation is for better or for verse. Poets in Celtic mythology were wizards. They could satirize a hero with a geas that left him (mostly him) gasping and socially constrained. Satirize your enemies. Leave them entranced and amazed. Poet them. Po them. Po et them. Pother.

This is the cruelest month--maybe. So let the beautiful snowflakes of middling spring put a delightful frost on everything, and make a lay of the land under the crystals we sing. Hatch reality from our supposing. Drive up the green flow burgeoning that breaks into a new imagining. Protest in verse. Rhyme a complaint. Couplet a minute. Metaphor an eternity. Celebrate your strange brain. Full fathom five politicians' lies with the dollar signs in their eyes. Work them over with respected works of ages past. Cut and pasta' them into oblivion.