on april, and, on why i am not a poet

designating months to celebrate things is a little silly, but it gets especially silly in april, because it is:

1. national humor month
2. national anxiety month
3. national poetry month

i can dig it, though. typically, i get more anxious in spring than in any other season. april 1st is april fool's day. poets are all over springtime. so it makes sense for these three things to get smooshed together.

yesterday another cassie remarked that no one reads poetry and no one buys poetry, even during national poetry month. this is true. a professor told me once--and i'm paraphrasing--that choosing to be a poet is one of the dumbest things you could ever do to yourself. and there aren't many poets out there, if you think about it. william carlos williams was a doctor. frank o'hara was an art critic and museum curator. these are people who wrote poetry. i write poetry sometimes, and sometimes people like it. but i am certainly not a poet.

even ginsberg held down a few jobs before "howl" really took off, and afterward he was still doing a lot more than writing. what makes ginsberg a poet, though, is that he really lived poetry, more than anyone else. when you listen to him talk it's like a poem. it doesn't matter what he's saying. this is why he wrote about anything and everything and still turned out perfect:

"Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters"

Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought! Now you'll have to think the same thing forever!

New York, June 7, 1980, 6:48 A.M

it boggles my mind. this is why i am not a poet.