4/9/2024

Chocolate Convulsion: Week 1 of National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month and, to people who fancy themselves poets and people who fancy themselves in need of a challenge, this means writing a poem every day until May.

I am one such person. Just like in November, I'm filling my larders with an entire month of labor. This also marks a year since I started writing again, a year since I lost my job, and a year since I met my best friend and changed my life forever. That's a hell of a Terminator from which I hope to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

But I have faith, friends. I'm motivated. My efforts in the year have not been in vain. In that intervening year I broke my deadname embargo and got published under my real name, performed a handful of times in my city, and got more comfortable with all the new words I found stuffed under my tongue. A month of writing poetry is rewarding, especially when you're not doing it alone. The communal endeavor of poets feels exactly like how Nicholson Baker described an international poetry convention in his novel The Anthologist:

"They were all being international poets in one place. The noise was incredible. Poets jabbering, poets laughing, a few poets looking hollow-eyed and glum."

Working with other poets in a crit circle for an entire month can feel dizzying like that, all the people around you just as committed, interested, and invested in their own craft as you. We get together and inspire each other, critique each other, and encourage each other. In the discord server I'm in, everyone posts their day's hard work and vents about the near-impossible ardor of writing under deadline with consistency.

A number of them are writing to a specific prompt that requires a different form every day while I committed to finishing my breast poem project. Of course, despite my best efforts I got a bad case of form envy. I wanted to have fun like my friends! So yesterday I gave myself the tiniest break from the bouncy castle of tit poems long enough to write a sestina. It was a nice reprieve and reminded me how much I love those complicated little French spirals.

We challenge each other. We influence each other. We inspire and poison each other. It's lovely. There's also something to be said of the pleasure of reading so many poems. Of hearing so many poems. None of the people in my little writing circle write like me.

I read their work and watch their words crash through the wall like Aerosmith barging in on Run DMC in the “Walk This Way” video.

Suddenly I'm faced with how a new person says what's on my mind. There's so much joy in putting the pen down and becoming, as Wayne Koestenbaum so beautifully describes in his masterwork The Queen's Throat, "pure receiver." He was talking about listening to opera. In the right circumstances, poetry can feel like the same thing.

That small self-erasure that comes from letting someone else's thoughts in the driver's seat. When the right poem gets in, it's like a low-grade hypnosis for as long as your eyes lick the page. And I always get so hungry for good words when I need to cook, and there's no better place to eat than the kitchen.

Early on in getting to know each other, before we fully put our tongues to the terrible third-rail of a long distance relationship, my girlfriend sent me Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke With You" with a caption that read "shot." Just as I finished reading it, she hit me with the chaser: "Having "Having a Coke With You" With You" by Mark Leidner.

I couldn’t believe it. I actually laughed out loud. The absolute nerve of her to send me two poems in conversation with each other, the latter of which is about the joy of hearing the former from a beautiful woman? I was utterly hooked. It happened, just like the end of Leidner’s poem, “and this was when I knew I wanted to be with you forever.”

I knew from that moment, without any doubt that I would love her as brutally and fully as a graveyard loves good rain. So much of our early courtship was simply hurling good quotes and excerpts and poems and snippets at each other. I let ornate coffins of memorized lines and half-remembered poems push through the soft loam until they kissed the close air at her feet. It didn’t have any of that electronic hum of googling things from the air, searching “good poems” on google until we felt clever. It was about diving into the pool naked with nothing but our memories. It was about teaching each other before we could become experts.

I wanted to lay all my inspirations bare for her appraisal. When two good people with good taste meet up it can feel electric. It can feel like the other half of The Anthologist’s thoughts on international poets:

"There was something wonderful seeing them in the room together, but also something a little perverse about it, too, like those kinds of chocolate cake that are filled with inner goops of extra chocolate, that have names like chocolate seizure, chocolate convulsion, chocolate climax."

When poets huddle around and share with each other, when my girlfriend whips out her terrifyingly close-to-full book of quotations that have resonated with her, I feel that convulsion and get sugary jitters of energy. I pick up my pen or my phone or my keyboard and I write something.

There's almost a recklessness to it. When forming our crit group, my friend and I decided that we could give each other feedback, but the main focus of our group would be validation and the doing itself.

We could edit our work in May, it's time to grind, to splash canvas, to shut up and tune out and fucking write.

But, for all our efforts, it's impossible not to want more, not to generate excess whirls of that naked lust for poetry. It gets too hot. It spins the turbines red and groaning. It has to be expelled. So I find myself more eagerly looking for open mics, for sub calls from magazines, for books on my shelves, new or otherwise.

April is one of those rare times where I find myself truly getting obsessed with poetry. The old ghost from my pre-transition life come back last year. It's suddenly all I want to talk about it. All I want to be around. It sweeps me up and thumps inside me. And so far it's the sweetest thing I've felt in weeks. So far it's almost decadent.

One week down. Three to go.

I listen.

I read.

I write.

I applaud.

I validate.

I praise.

I recite.

I convulse.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B