My Poetry Month, 2022
Friday, April 1, I drove to BookWoman during HH to hunt for a few more titles to add to my quickly growing section ahead of celebrating. This little idea had been kicking around my mind as a possible evolution from my hours logged hunched over my lightboard for calligraphy practice, and would require pushing myself to practice reading full poems out loud.
In January 2019, I dedicated more time to reading more poetry. Alone in the studio, I read poems out loud as a second way of experiencing the lines. Warming up. Reading a third time for the extra good ones! I started with a handful of the names/books below and a subscription to Poetry magazine. My day job took me to Chicago for a week in the summer, and on my last/only free afternoon to explore, hours before my flight, I took the L to The Poetry Foundation, where they had Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit on full display (free). The floor to two-story, full window front of the building illuminated the crisp white exhibition wall, neatly tacked with every page of her book, alternating pages on display, regularly flipped by staff for the exhibit. I read what lines I could, mesmerized. I think this was the first time I saw poetry on display as an art collection; this was the first time I had ever seen an entire book on display at once. In 2022, in solitude, my celebration was a kept mess of every poetry book I owned at the time, in piles on my coffee table to grab from as needed. The audio of poetry became more important to me in 2020. First as a way I self-soothe, saving up episodes of The Slowdown for Ada Limón to teach and nourish me, and then to share, recording my audio only, reading poems and sending out to people I loved. The next year, I celebrated with vaccination shots on the 1st (Mary Oliver’s ‘we shake with joy’) and the 29th (finishing The Cancer Journals, asking The Audre Lorde Questionnaire to Oneself).
At 11 PM, a wild hare in me plugged in my lightboard at the far corner of my bookshelf, on the shelf below my poetry section. Mary Oliver’s Devotions perfectly suited my test, so I opened the book, framed my page, and read SPRING. 20~ minutes later, I recorded the first poem. I played it back multiple times, mouthing along anxiously, and using my fingertip to check my audio against the words on the page. When I felt good about the reading, I posted the full reading to my Instagram Story, near midnight and directly went to bed. I knew after I posted the first poem, as a silent commitment to myself, I would push to read a poem to share from the studio every night to celebrate My National Poetry Month, 2022. And I did.
FULL APRIL 2022 LIST OF POEMS w/ LINK to My Readings archived for paid readers only. <3