In 2023, my New Year’s resolution was to take my lifelong flirtation with poetry, which I have written about elsewhere, into the next step. I needed to take a poetry writing class. I must have found my first class on Facebook. It was run by a nice woman who used to run a writing group in St. Louis, and much of the group were her St. Louis former cohorts. The class got me over the first hurdle, which was to write poems and share them with strangers. But it was too easy, so my next class was with the 92nd St. Y with an instructor who I won’t name because I found both her and her approach very chilly.

By now I was Goldilocks – too easy, too hard – so I submitted a few poems again to the 92nd St Y, to Advanced Poetry with Maya C. Popa because I wanted to work with her. I never expected to be accepted. But I was. And she was just right. I typed “write” the first time – Freudian, perhaps, but not a slip.

Then I went to podcasts. The Slowdown is a podcast hosted currently by Major Jackson, formerly by Ada Limon, which begins with a rumination from the host on anything going on in his/her/their life, followed by a poem. These podcasts are pleasant, but I need to hear a poem more than once. Which is what happens on Poetry Unbound, hosted by Padraig O Tuama, who reads the poem, reflects on it at length, and then reads it again. The New Yorker Poetry podcast hosted by Kevin Young is also on heavy rotation in my podcast feed. (Do people still say “heavy rotation”?)

Back to classes: I’ve had several more with Maya C.  Popa, but I am a flawed student. I am conflicted about sharing my poetic work (“work”!), I don’t know how to revise, I don’t know some of the terminology my classmates are throwing around , sometimes I freak out and bail, and this is a run-on sentence. But now I’m hooked.

Many years ago, for April is Poetry Month, I posted a fragment of a poem, along with the title and name of the poet, on my Facebook page. I decided this year to do this again, with the proviso that I only highlight work by living poets. (Someone forgot to tell me that Eavon Boland had died.)

I front-loaded this endeavor by stockpiling two weeks’ worth of snippets of poems. I started with poets I “knew,” in the sense that I had met them at a writer’s conference, or heard them read, or generally been in a place where for a pulse of a moment (poetic?), we breathed the same air. So this included Patricia Smith, Kathleen Graber, A. Van Jordan and Jon Riccio, all of whom I encountered at Vermont College of Fine Arts. They were followed by Poets of Queens – Jared Harel, Jared Beloff and Oleana Jennings. And then people I’d encountered in magazines, or whose books I’d purchased.

The selection of the day was not dictated by any circumstances of the day. For example, in the past , I have chosen a poem reflecting my sister’s interests on for her April birthday. And many worthy poems were not included simply because I could not find an engaging snippet that could be easily extracted from the larger work.

As they say in baseball (also an April event), there’s always next year.