Lately, I haven’t been much living in the land of poetry. I met my sometime-to-be ex-husband at a poetry open mic. I earned a Master’s in Fine Arts Degree in poetry, performed and competed in poetry slams for years, have more friends that are poets than maybe anything else.

But when I got pregnant, poetry left me. I couldn’t write it or read it, couldn’t go listen to a performance of it because I couldn’t focus for long enough. It just didn’t make sense. Because so much of my life had revolved around it, this was a big loss.

I have been experiencing other losses lately: my marriage, my trust, and soon we’ll sell our house. So, I’m taking the poetry back. I need it.

Last November, I used prompts from Poetic Asides and wrote 29 poems in 30 days. The first day, I brought my journal to the computer to type in the poem so I could edit it later. Immediately, this struck me as a bad plan. I was too tempted to edit it at the moment and knew that this could derail my month of poems. It would be so easy to get the critical editor voice in my head and have that voice interfere with the creative process. I decided to write all of the poems in the journal and not look back at them until the month was done.. Then I could type and edit them.

Committing to writing a poem a day and actually writing them got my poetry muscles working again. It was similar to the experience I had as a college freshman when I felt like I’d put on a Shakespeare decoder ring and all of a sudden I could understand Shakespeare. The veil had lifted.

In November, as I made time to write poetry each day, I began to think in images again, noticed nuances of language in lyrics and novels. I once again had books of poetry for bedtime reading. A part of me that I loved and had dedicated so much of my life to was back.

Well, April is National Poetry Month and I’m going to write 30 poems in 30 days using prompts from Read Write Poem.

Beside signing the Read Write Poem pledge, I just updated my Publications page with eight poems that have just been published or are forthcoming. What a wonderful way to get ready for NaPoWriMo. If you write poetry, maybe you’d like to join me in writing 30 poems in 30 days.

I won’t be posting them here because my internal editor comes with seeing the typed work, but I’ll write about my process throughout the month. Please let me know if you’re writing too and how it’s going.