Weather: Overcast...for now.
Listening To: Our Lady Peace, "Will The Future Blame Us"
Taking a Break From: virology essay...and by break, I mean a break from thinking about starting it.

National Poetry Month

April is a good month for poetry, for me. It's like I'm extra-receptive to it. For one thing, it's a month of madcap weather here: just today, it rained, and then snowed and then sleeted, and now the sun is glaring angrily through the clouds to glint off wet pavement and dirty cars. Everything is so changeable. The world becomes this crazy mosaic of light and wind and temperature of a million varieties, in combinations seen only once or twice a year. It's like Nature is trying on a hundred different outfits before going out for the day. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what I have to do: I'm stuck between winter clothes and true spring fare, which is just a further reminder that everything is in upheaval. It's my birth month, the time of year when I adopt a new age as my own, and it usually takes a few tries to get that straight, as well. It's typically my busiest time of year, as everything races to a close, and also the time when I want to walk to Westdale, to sit outside, to wear skirts and sandals and to laugh with people. It's time to think about the summer, which goes from being a distant memory to being a present reality in no time flat. It's normally when Easter pops in, a reminder of renewal, fertility, and life; it's also a memorial month for several of my family members, now passed on. April is changeful, whimsical and teasing, and sometimes as cruel as T.S. Eliot insisted it was. It's capricious and insensitive, and sometimes I wonder how I'm going to get through it, but there's always the sense that I'd like to hang onto it longer, just to see more of its rare gifts.

So I think because April is a time of such chaos, whether gleeful or wrathful, it's a good time for poetry. I appreciate how much calmer poetry makes me. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recalled in tranquility; so even if it's poetry about uprooting and unrest and uncertainty, the calmness of spirit needed to write it comes through to me as well. I appreciate that others feel the same way I do, and can describe it better than I can. And I guess part of it is that my spirit is just as rumbly for change as April is, sometimes, and that makes for a fertile rooting ground for new ideas and turns of phrase.

Here are a couple of Philip Larkin poems that speak to me these days. They are both from 1955's The Less Deceived, although they're not deliberately put together like I've put them together here. They also speak of changes, in days and seasons, and of the different ways change can affect us. I cop to being affected in both ways by the prospect of change, recently; I think that's just the way spring is going to be for me, for a very long time.

Happy April, everyone.

~SQ