Some days lately, T.S. Eliot’s words have run through my mind.
April is the cruellest month.
I was in college the first time I read The Waste Land, taking my one and only poetry class. It so impacted me (not in a good way) that I didn’t take another, though I deeply love poetry. I’d been too worried about practicality to major in any sort of writing-focused discipline, despite dreaming of journalism or creative writing. As a result, I hadn’t taken any actual writing classes, just classes in literature. This one poetry class was my experiment.
I was a senior when I took the class, 20 or 21 and preparing to graduate. I’d always liked politics and had long seen myself as someone interested in helping to build change, so focusing my studies on international relations made sense. It caught my interest and my imagination, but I never puzzled out how it fit in my life, nor received guidance on how to navigate that question. That was a downfall of attending a large state university; I don’t remember ever meeting with an advisor beyond my freshman year, and even then, I had just one appointment with a graduate student who I’m sure had a long list of 18-year-olds to deal with. Though she must have asked about my interests, I don’t remember it coming up in our single 20-minute meeting.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if someone I loved had said, why not take a writing class? If someone had pointed out that I was forever scribbling in journals and on random slips of paper. If someone had said, maybe that means something.
I think I’ve always been a good writer. I know I’ve always really loved writing. I don’t actually remember a time when I didn’t write, though there was a long era in which I stopped writing in any sort of dedicated way because I didn’t think I had anything to contribute.
When I started again, it was in secret. It stayed there, in the dark, for many years. But that was a long time ago. I don’t want to lose or hide my writing again. I’ve hoped to study writing; I dream of earning an MFA abroad. For many reasons, that may not happen, but I’m not ready to give up that dream. Not yet.
A handful of years ago – it was the pandemic, so it was six years ago – I really got into the idea of National Poetry Month, which is coming to a close in these waning days of April. I sent a poem to friends every morning, not to analyze but instead to anchor; to remind myself and them that wild beauty exists in the world even when we can’t see it.
Since then, April has been a kind of touchstone to me, a joy to anticipate and a meditation to embrace, regardless of whatever else is happening in my life. This month, I’ve been taking a writing class that uses poetry to inspire essays. Each morning, I’ve gotten up, made my Americano, read a poem, and sat down to write. Nothing is edited or prettied-up; when I post my contribution for the day, there it is, in all of its rapidly created glory. I don’t go back and change anything.
It makes me feel alive, like I feel when I am on a bike on a beautiful day, or when I am dancing in the living room with my child, or when my partner and I are laughing about something silly we’ll soon forget, or when I am anywhere with my sister, or my college roommates, or my other best friends. That’s what writing is like for me.
I didn’t love The Waste Land when I was in college, but its first line lives on, sometimes resonates deeply with me, just as others lines do, from other poems.
Let the storm wash the plates.
You do not have to be good.
somewhere I have never travelled.
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds.
My life is made better for all of it, for all of these miraculous words that writers strung together. These words cross ages and experience just as any good art does, speaking across and collapsing time.
A part of me hopes that maybe words I write might resonate with others too, but that’s not why I write them. I write them because I have to. I write them because they help me. I write them to learn and to grow. I write them to cement joy and hold hands with sorrow.
April is the cruellest month.
Now I will post this, and go.
The Wandering Introvert 