April is Poetry Month

It’s the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month, begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. I’m celebrating it in my own fashion, reading favorite poems about April. T.S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest month.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was equally suspicious: “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” An idiot! When I read those lines, spring fever beginning to throb in my veins, I feel like Millay is mocking me for being so awed, again, by the magnolia blossoms flinging open their floppy petals for a brief window of delirium.

To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.” Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.”

April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.”

We do. April days contain multiple seasons. There’s a lesson in there, if we want to take it, about holding multiple things at once. Things aren’t only good (or only bad). I often return to these lines from David Ferry’s translation of Horace: “It’s true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters; / It’s also true that Jupiter takes them away.”

Certainty is easier. April, in much of the country, is liminal, vacillating between winter and spring, refusing to resolve cleanly. If you look closely, you can observe this tension: the tulips quivering in the gusting wind; people in shorts and people wearing mittens on the same block; stepping onto the porch to see a robin and instead seeing your own breath. The internal work is much the same. Sitting quietly, paying close attention to the weather inside, you can observe the hope that blows in with the fear, the lightness and heaviness that seem to be competing. The psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach advises greeting each experience that arises within us with the phrase “this too,” accepting what’s there, even if it’s uncomfortable.

So: How are you celebrating National Poetry Month? You might listen to “The Poetry Magazine Podcast,” or, if you’re less inclined to embrace it, read the writer Ben Lerner on “The Hatred of Poetry.” Or better yet, embrace April’s spirit of contradictions and do both. While I was writing this, a friend sent me a poem by Jane Hirshfield that reminded me of poetry’s enduring potency: “Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. / Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.”