Poetry Talk

How is your National Poetry Writing Month going? Have you written or read (or both!) a lot of poetry this month? I started strong but have fallen off a bit lately due to my state's legislative season taking a lot of my time as an activist. April always seems like such a busy month!

If you have been writing poems, what kinds have you been focused on this year? I often spot trends in the ones I write, especially if I write consistently enough to really have enough to compare. In fact, you can leave a blank space after each poem to go back and analyze why you wrote it that day. You might learn something about yourself.

Have any poems you love that you'd like to share, or that you'd like to have analyzed by other poets? Share them in the chat!

How's your first week of National Poetry Month going? I've managed to read a few poems, coax one out of The Teenager and write a short one every day so far. Most of them have only been three lines but I did write one that turned into a parody of "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones!

We decided not to make the poetry wall this year just because it's covered with a timeline this year, but we're writing them in our notebooks. My teen has taken to the task with sarcasm which is fine with me. It's still engaging the brain and results in creative results every time no matter the motivation, and sometimes it's even fun.

How are you celebrating? Any poems to share yet? Post them in the chat!

Recently my teenager, who wants to be an entrepreneur and comic artist but also loves psychology and philosophy, begged me why history was so important to learn. I pointed him to an article his philosophy teacher sent us about why philosophy should be taught to plumbers.

This example of a doctor who utilizes poetry to reach his parents is another wonderful example. Poetry isn't separate from medicine. On the contrary, it can be medicine, depending on what's going on with you, and it's certainly about the human condition. When we separate subjects we forget how interconnected it all is--how interconnected we all are. It's all a part of our world, after all, broken down into little boxes or not.

What subjects were you most surprised to find relevant in your life? How has poetry helped you in your life or career?

"Cancel culture" just isn't a thing. People with that much power certainly aren't canceled unless they do something super heinous, and even then most continue to get away with it. Just look at the previous president. Consequence culture, however, is a thing, and now that we are familiar with some of the terrible things famous people have done, it makes sense to not follow or study them anymore.

But how do you do it? How do you do it with a poet like Pablo Naruda, who was such an incredible writer who admitted to raping someone? What about Philip Larkin? And what methods do you use? Would you stop studying an artist with a problematic past? The issue there is that so many of the ones studied certainly have issues, although they range from deeply troublesome to downright criminal.

Perhaps we should just start studying new poets altogether. What do you think?