I love April because although we can celebrate and enjoy poetry all year, we dedicate EXTRA love and attention to poetry this month. And that makes me happy!

As always, I’m celebrating by writing a poem each day. This year, for the first time ever, I’m nine for nine – meaning, that I haven’t yet had to “make up” any days. Usually, by this time I “owe” four or five poems and the backlog gets weightier as the month goes by. This year is different, and I wanted to tell you what has made the difference for me in case it is inspiring for you.

The main thing? As always it is simply this: LOWER THE BAR.

My usual expectation of myself in April is something along these lines:

1. Write a poem by hand on scratch paper.
2. Revise and improve it.
3. Type it into a Word doc, doing another round of edits and improvements.
4. Print the poem and put it in a binder.

Perhaps it doesn’t look like an oppressive list of expectations, but somehow it turns out to be rather onerous – especially that transition from hand-writing to typing. I’m old enough that those feel like completely different countries and a passport of some kind is necessary to travel between them.

Further, I don’t know where I got the idea that these April poems had to be all neatly contained in their Word docs in order to “count.” As soon as I hear myself thinking that way – about what “counts” and what doesn’t – I know I’m in the realm of my Inner School Marm. And I sure don’t want her to rule my life, and neither do you.

I’ve chosen to have more fun this April and so I crafted a different set of expectations:

1. Write a draft of a poem.

It doesn’t have to be “finished,” it doesn’t have to be typed and improved, it doesn’t have to belong in the Norton Anthology. It just has to exist.

Working this way, I can take my messy little notebook outside and sit on The Fairy Rock. I can curl up on the couch. I can write a poem between one music lesson and the next.

The point of all this is to figure out what feels heavy or burdensome in one’s expectations and shear it away so that doing what you want to do becomes easier and more fun.

Doesn’t this make you wonder what other parts of your life your Inner School Marm is ruling – without you even knowing? And doesn’t it feel like a fun project to scale back inflated expectations so that things are delicious again?

Sure does to me!

(the picture is a messy draft poem from yesterday, written while seated on The Fairy Rock)