keep the doctor away

Every year people are saying to me - okay, on the internet not as I walk down the street or whatever - "Hey. it's National Poetry Month in America, everybody's writing a poem every day for the month of April, wanna try?"

I walk on by stony-faced. I don't have time for that kind of shit.

This year, though - perhaps because I'm not feeling quite overcommitted enough, or maybe there's a little patch of blue hovering over beyind the horizon of my Ted Hughes letters piece (due mid-April), or maybe it's just a mystery - I thought, well, why not? Let's give it a go.

Yes, folks. That's a poem, a whole new poem, every day for thirty days (hath September, April June and oh yes so that's okay then). It sounds good from here, write on the tube, jot down in lunch hour, maybe a scribble in bed of an evening... but then that's how I currently do all the other things I'm doing! The things that make it so I can't write poetry! But then the whole point is that I do, occasionally, write a poem. I fit them into the cracks. Isn't that where they belong, really, I mean really? (Hm. Tell Ted Hughes that. Or Milton. But then, women have always written in the cracks.) And but thirty, in one month? Maybe by the end of it I'll be like the old guys, Keats and Shelley etc,who could knock off a perfectly-rhymed sonnet as a parlour game, or Byron who could write Don Juan while fighting a duel with the other hand...

Anyway, the good news is, it seems that the Academy of American Poets is going to give us something back. I love their little pill box. By signing up to their newsletter you can receive a poem a day, every day, to sweeten the pill of having to write one of the damn things. Not sure it will keep the doctor away in practice: I fully expect to go insane trying to keep up.

And I won't be posting them up here. Bit redundant, that. But I might tell you about them.