April is here, and it’s raining to prove it. March, for me, was far crueler than I hope April will turn out to be, and brought with it some not-so-fun creative rejections and an ensuing nasty case of writer’s block (so sorry in advance if this newsletter feels a bit more aimless than usual). But I wrote a poem on Sunday and delighted in it for the first time in a while, which feels like a fitting way to greet April, which is indeed National Poetry Month.
Even though I’m a working poet, I tend to forget that April is National Poetry Month. I generally recognize various national months of observance that affect my particular intersection of identities based on the uptick in performance gigs that follow. October brought a last minute reading at a local college (though parsing what does and does not constitute a “Latinx” poem is never fun). A slew of school visits during Black History Month paid for some unexpected dental work. And as one of Healthline’s Notable Eco-Feminists (a truly random listicle that is the gift that keeps on giving) April, for me, usually results in gigs for Earth Month rather than poetry (that said, I will be making a valiant attempt to write thirty poem-shaped things in April’s 30 days, alongside my fellow poets of Bloof Books, which you can read over here.)
Why do I write poems? Why do I write poems? Why does Caitlin Clark play basketball?1 You shoot a three once, you like the feeling of it, have some natural inclination for it for whatever reason, learn a bit of craft, realize you can do it again, maybe better, maybe smoother, more craft, hear the net go swish, feel satisfied in a job well done. I don’t play basketball because, in the words of Maggie Nelson, we simply don’t get to choose.
Books were at the center of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a book-rich household, the grandchild of an English teacher and a high school principal, the child of two college professors, and I learned to read early. As an only child, books were my company, my playtime. After Katrina, through the evacuation and my distance from New Orleans, my family’s sudden move to Houston the year after, they became my refuge. When I was ten or so, I attempted to write a novel, but that was mostly because my favorite character in my favorite book (The Penderwicks) wanted to be a novelist. I wasn’t a storyteller; words were where the magic lay.
I started writing poetry when I was thirteen. I had a lot of feelings and I was listening to a lot of Fall Out Boy and I was walking around with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, and poetry seemed as good a method as any to channel them. Come high school, a friend introduced me to performance poetry via Sarah Kay’s “If I Should Have a Daughter (and Rudy Francisco’s “Scars/To the New, Boyfriend,” which proved, shall we say, emotionally necessary after I got dumped by my middle school boyfriend on the fourth day of freshman year).
The thing that I came to love about poetry is that it didn’t ask me for anything – for plot, like fiction, for clarity or understanding like in an essay. In every other area of my life, I felt immense pressure to be legible, to make myself Make Sense™. I was taught that my feelings were a vulnerability, that they’d turn me into a target, that I wouldn't be taken seriously. Poetry told me that feeling itself was enough. And I had feelings in spades I gravitated to lyric, to confession; I poured over Mary Oliver and Richard Siken and Louise Gluck.
For a while this search for intimacy made me melodramatic; I wanted to distance myself from my pain so I could pretend to be above it, so I didn’t have to experience it. But at some point along the way I realized that this intimacy could serve a more useful purpose. It could comb through the wreckage of my life, the environmental injustices I’d witnessed, the systemic horrors I came to know as a student of ethnic studies, and it could body forth a feeling from the noise of history. And through that feeling, I could access, as Jackie Wang writes in Carceral Capitalism, “a vibrational experience that is capable of awakening your desire for another world.”
Our feelings, our desire for this new world, are not the end point of our struggle. But they are a starting point. Abolitionist and organizer Mariame Kaba teaches us that everything worthwhile is done with other people. And it’s my hope that the search for intimacy that my loneliness taught me, returns us to one another, to accomplish the difficult and necessary work of sorting out how to build a more just world.
I was honored to have a few of my poems included in When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent. The title of the anthology is taken from one of my poems, “Dispatches from a Country Without Name,” which you can read here. A few of us in the anthology will be reading on April 10 at 6 pm and you can catch it virtually (registration link here).
Currently reading: Cicada Summer by Erica McKeen
Spinning: Heartbeat by Earthquake Lights
I realize it’s a bit of an asshole move to compare myself to one of our greatest living basketball players, but the metaphor doesn’t work if I use someone less well known, so please forgive the arrogance.
Forgot it was April is National Poetry Month. Be arrogant. Most poets with an eye for appreciation are. Maybe you will check out one of my books one day. https://www.amazon.com/Late-Nite-Winds-Club-Paradise/dp/152277307X?ref_=ast_author_dp&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.G0mGj6tGqAciwY2cRV9JvhcJ52X9fLiLu30AXT3pB9-6EnHopb0K-lpDrXwnjoL5NKiteW-l9vHxx7oHs2GOadALmtgX60SVVn7_NflrHSCyZh9o46AaN3tRCJma8ed4._PGQ4V_D0bZHEO6u65LwEXwjchs_aa_ae2Vu75xRPcE&dib_tag=AUTHOR