The Biblio File April 2017 Essay: “April Fool”

APRIL FOOL

“A poem prompt a day,” Two Sylvias Press advertised for April, National Poetry Month. “Only fourteen dollars.”

I’ll do anything within reason these days to fill my psyche with creativity rather than terror. And if I can’t read music but I sing, I should, I figured, be able to write poetry, though I don’t know how.

I bit. I bought. Every morning since, I’ve opened my prompt and slapped out some scraggly ass lines, figuring if I get a couple of poems worth fiddling with or fixing, I’ll get my money and, more importantly, my time’s worth.

I feel a little like a fool, but in the Flannery O’Connor sense of foolishness as a virtue. “There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once,” Ms. O’Connor said.

I’ve stared without getting the point a lot this month. At the prompts themselves. “Play with synesthesia.” “Write about beauty in the midst of pain.” “Begin with this line, ‘Tell me…’”

I stare at blank pages, so white they shine. At words, so close to right, but not quite. At household objects—the kitchen faucet, my bedside lamp, a used mascara tube. At nature—the cedars so tall I have to stretch backwards to see the tops, the kingfishers plunging into our river, the moss wrapping branches in electric green. I stare at them stupidly, without knowing, as if for the first time. I stare at the inside of my head, where words sometimes appear.

One night, after a “moon” prompt, I stare at the moon. I write this poem:

Because only 59% of the moon is visible from Earth,
I set aside my preconceived notions
That the part I see portrays the whole.
That slice. The gentle cradle
May front a utopia, a spiritual candy store.
It could, of course, hide lonely, arid desert.
I choose to believe the former.
As with people who at first seem lacking,
Half-full, not enough,
But prove, once I get inside them,
Luminous.

Happy April. May we be fools who find the best in one another.

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