poetry. sacrosanct. midwife.
Thirty days has the cruelest month
and thirty days in a row for nine years
during April I have written a poem.
I try and mostly fail to communicate
to my students the worth of such a thing,
poetry in and of itself, yes, let alone
writing one every day for thirty days,
but they don’t quite buy it.
I think they see it as a kind of madness.
They’re not wrong. There is something
obsessive about it, and maybe
masochistic, although, for me,
rarely is pain part of the equation.
It might be described as a kind of addiction,
but the high is nominal, a fleeting feeling
that, yes, after all, I have written another poem.
Whoop dee doo. It’s something else.
Almost devotional, religious, but more
than that, there is this ecstatic notion
that the endeavor has birthed some
essential part of me that wants to live:
poetry, the sacrosanct midwife
to every creative impulse within.
michael jarmer 