Why 30 Days? Why 30 Poems? Because April is the Cruelest Month

As we look back on our recently concluded 30 Days, 30 Poems Project celebrating National Poetry Month and continue to mark Mental Health Awareness Month in May, we are sharing this piece today, about the intersection between the two.

If you are in the US and need urgent mental health assistance, you can call, text or chat 988. For assistance in other countries, find phone numbers and links here.

Content warnings for sexual violence and PTSD. -ed.

Breeding / lilacs out of the dead land

“April is the cruelest month.” I’m not a T. S. Eliot fan, but the fact that April is both National Poetry Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month would seem to suggest that there’s some truth to what Eliot said. When I can say “Poetry saved my life” and “Poetry could have destroyed me,” and know that both are true statements, I have to acknowledge that TS Eliot was, at least a little bit, right. 

The 30 Days, 30 Poems project has taken up my April for a f​​ew years now. It’s one of the 2 Rules projects I’m most proud of. Our readers really like it. I’m in awe of the way that it really does meet the three goals that I set when I envisioned the project:

-To get people who might not otherwise read a poem to read a poem
-To get people who might otherwise read only the canonical [usually white, male] voices to read a bit deeper and a bit broader 
-To introduce poets who are not ‘canonical’ but just as incredible.

It’s also developed traditions

-A yearly open mic reading
-A yearly poem from Shakespeare.
-One about poetry.
-One about sexual assault.
-A day when Adam and I choose a piece to reflect on together.  
-And this year we introduced workshops with award winning poets and fantastic editors. 

I learn so much each year. And the project keeps growing and growing.

So that’s great, right?

Mixing Memory and Desire

But to get here, we have to start at the beginning of this story. The part where poetry tried to destroy me.

Adam and I met in early-pandemic. It was 2020, and a mutual acquaintance from the summer camp we attended about a decade apart asked: “Hey teachers and artists, what are you doing to move your work online while we’re locked down?” Adam talked about his teaching, and I thought it sounded like something my kids would enjoy. We set a time to talk on the phone, but at the end of our conversation, it wasn’t my kids who were going to be studying with him, it was me.

We began soon after, and fell into a routine. I looked forward to our Friday night meetings. We’d do a writing exercise, then read a short story or a poem and analyze it together. We’d review whatever I’d written that week. I began to find a voice. I felt like someone was starting to listen to me as a writer, and was as focused as I was on my goal–”to become a better writer.” And I was finding joy in writing again; something that had been stolen from me years before. In 2020, when everyone was struggling to find bright spots in their lives, I found one and put all the energy I could find into it.

He took me out on a sled, / And I was frightened

That all changed on the night Adam selected Johann von Goethe’s “Der Erlkönig” for us to discuss. Maybe if we’d just read the poem, it would have been okay. Maybe. But Adam had taught this poem before, and had used a YouTube video along with it. And that night he did, too. Only on that night, something about what we were doing triggered a PTSD flashback. As I lost control, crying, hyperventilating and punching at the air, Adam (still a near-stranger on a zoom call) was watching, trying to calm me, and doing everything he could to ensure that I was okay. 

That’s the thing about flashbacks. Sometimes you just don’t know what’s going to set them off. That night, poetry did it. Poetry left me screaming and crying and punching the air. Poetry left me hyperventilating and breaking down in front of a near-total stranger. It forced me to talk about rape with someone I hardly knew. About my experience as a rape survivor.

Your Shadow at evening rising to meet you

It’s not like I’d never talked about it before. By this time I had had plenty of practice talking about it. I’d lectured/taught about it in large groups. With intimate partners. And of course, with health care providers. I’d never talked about it with a near-complete stranger though. 

I knew that at some point I’d have had to discuss it with Adam. At some point it would become relevant. Maybe because of some piece of literature that we were discussing. Maybe because of something I was writing. It was bound to come up. I just expected to have a little more control over the situation. A little time to think about how to say what needed to be said.

It didn’t happen. And poetry could have ruined everything. If Adam had approached things differently. Or noped out (which he’d have been absolutely justified in doing though he claims otherwise.) If I hadn’t picked up the phone two days after everything happened, and called him to make sure we were okay. If I had let what happened scare me away. 

The hyacinth girl

But I loved poetry too much to let it ruin everything for me. And I had started to fall in love with writing again, too. And so, I fought all the instincts that were telling me to run. I stayed. And I kept working with Adam. 

I also kept reading poetry. I wrote about poetry. And even wrote poetry of my own. And two and a half years later, we had founded 2 Rules of Writing and were a few months into running it: working so hard, building the website, (with the help of a few regular columnists,) creating our Facebook community, and trying to figure out what 2 Rules of Writing was going to look like.

The hanged man

At the time we were a bit over two years into the pandemic, it was still too risky for me to be out in public too much. Two years in mostly-isolation is a lot. And managing day to day life with chronic illness is difficult. And for other reasons, late winter and early spring are hard on me, too. I was fighting depression even harder than usual. Adam, on the other hand, went to Bangalore. As Adam enjoyed time with loved ones, I sank deeper and deeper into depression. Adam did his best to make sure I remembered that things would get better, but day by day, things just felt worse. I struggled to see the point of existing a day, a week, a month from now. Things just kept getting darker. 

I finally admitted to him that I wasn’t sure I could see a month from now. 

I don’t know what exactly Adam said. Something about one day at a time, and hanging on until he got back. That was all he asked. That I find a way to keep going until he got back. (To tell the truth, my overdeveloped sense of obligation probably would have kept me from doing anything until I knew that someone would take care of my cats and that there was a way to keep the website going, but I wasn’t about to acknowledge that at the time.)

Lady of situations

I needed a project. Something that I had to check in on every day that would make sure that I was doing something other than staring at the walls. It couldn’t be something just for me, either. It needed to be something other people could see, could also check in on. I had to be accountable to someone other than myself for the daily outcome of this project. And it had to be something I could manage between the depression energy vampire and the usual chronic illness exhaustion.

With Adam in India for the first part of April, I couldn’t rely on checking in with him, either. But what I did have was this website. And an accompanying Facebook group that was still so fresh that we needed to work to generate content. I also had a stack of poetry books nearby and a calendar that reminded me “April is National Poetry Month.” 

I had promised Adam thirty days. And April has thirty days. I could certainly read one poem a day for thirty days, but where’s the accountability in that? If I was going to read a poem, I could post about it. A daily post about it would make sure that someone else would see that I’d checked in for the day. A Facebook post just doesn’t take much work though. I needed more. 

That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout?

2 Rules of Writing had only existed for a few months. We needed ways to draw people to the website. So if I was going to read a poem every day, why not write something about that poem every day? And why not post it on the website and try to get people to read the other things we were posting? I wasn’t certain that I could rely on Adam for the first part of the month, but I did reach out to some of our other friends, and our Twitter followers so that if I didn’t have it together to write fresh content, I had something to post.

It sounded like a good idea. It sounded like a plan I could manage. I consulted Adam, who agreed that it sounded like something we could handle. He also agreed to share the daily work when he returned from India. And so, I built a few web pages, picked out a few poems, and on April 1, 2022, I got started. 

What I didn’t realize then was how much people would enjoy it. I read a lot of poetry, but would anyone else (other than Adam) get on board with what I wanted to try and do? It turns out they did. That even people who don’t read a lot of poetry often have a favorite. And people like sharing their favorites whether it’s snacks or poems.

It was successful enough that we did it again in 2023. In 2024, not only did we do 30 Days, 30 Poems again, but we added four poetry workshops. It just keeps growing.

Yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

Obviously, I survived April 2022. At some point, things got better enough that I could keep going. I don’t know what changed or when it changed, just that it did. If I hadn’t reached out for help, I don’t know what might have happened. I was able to rely on my overdeveloped sense of obligation to stick to the agreement to get to the end of the month. If things hadn’t turned a corner somewhere in April, I might not have made it through May. Ironically, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, too. 

Sometimes it feels like poetry and trauma can’t be pried apart. The poet Roger Robinson said, “Poets can touch hearts and minds; they can translate trauma into something people can face. Sometimes there’s a cost for the poet to do that as it takes looking at the trauma right in the face and then allowing others to bear the idea of trauma safely” And that’s exactly where my journey has taken me. Poetry tried to destroy me. Poetry has given me a way to communicate my anger. And then, at an emotional low point, when my nightly wishes included not waking up in the morning, poetry was the life raft I held on to until things began to get better. As I think about the transition from poetry month to mental health month, I can only think that poetry whether it was destructive or constructive, poetry for me…poetry is survival.