In late fourteenth-century London, a wine-merchant’s son, later a controller of customs on wool and leather and eventually a keeper of the king’s many residences and palaces wrote the lines that wed the “Sweet showers of April” with the spirit of adventure, pilgrimage, and renewal:
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,….
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…
Much later, in the twentieth-century, an American poet with midwestern roots, transplanted in London, reframed our memory of April:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Is it because of Geoffrey Chaucer and T.S. Eliot that the Academy of American Poets has chosen April as National Poetry Month? Not really. But if an official time frame needs to be established for the nation to celebrate poetry, April, with its marked associations, is well chosen. Suspended between memory and desire, we might be content with winter inertia, but poetry can awaken buried emotions and thoughts, stirring new ideas and perhaps even new departures.
You can celebrate poetry by following some of the suggestions offered by the Academy of American poets–just visit their web site, Poets.org. This year the Academy honors the centennial of Elizabeth Bishop, born in 1911, one of our many poet laureates who are appointed by the Library of Congress. You can ask for and receive a “National Poetry Month” poster issued by the Academy; it is adorned with a line from Bishop’s poem “A Word with You”: “Bright Objects Hypnotize the Mind.”
Our current poet laureate, also an environmentalist and pacifist, is W.S. Merwin, his poetry an homage to ordinary life rendered extraordinary:
Invocation
The day hanging by its feet with a hole
In its voice
And the light running into the sandHere I am once again with my dry mouth
At the fountain of thistles
Preparing to sing
Most of us may not have ever written a poem, but we should keep in mind that poetry is not the provenance of poets alone but all of us: poetry is language in essence, voiced by us using our individual intonations, rhythms, and nuances. Even if at times, the fountain is full of thistles, the invocation to speak belongs to all and in all seasons. Enjoy April. Enjoy poetry.