April is the foolish month. Blooms, passion, exposition, expedition, thunderstorm and sunshine.
I'm writing (and not editing much) from Louisville, Kentucky. I hope my adventures in teaching English will resume in Anatolia this summer. After the Covid lockdown years, the terrible 2023 earthquake in Turkey, and the death of my mother in America, I find myself suddenly fifty years old and gray bearded. Aging seems sudden anyway. I'm working hard at a trade I was hired into as a boy over thirty years ago— cooking, working in a kitchen.
Whether I am teaching, cooking, digging graves, mowing park grass, or any of the other jobs I've had in recent years, I remain constantly cognizant of the poetry that binds all peoples and places, matters and circumstances together in a whole reality that sometimes only seems to be unraveling. The Oregon poet, William Stafford, said that writing poems is like grabbing onto the end of an endless thread. Bill said this long before the internet.
The lyrical utterances of ordinary people in extraordinary times, the flavor of food and the rhythm of local music and pattern of life, the myriad faces of old and young, the calculated grammars of narratives, histories, lore, and religion-- Allah the Almighty has (by my own spiritual perception) set me to poetry, as economy set me to the oven and kitchen knife; or education set me to book and keyboard.
So this National Poetry Month, I want to celebrate the many unrecognized poets in America and across the Earth who practice the many forms and disciplines of poetry. The authentic intelligence of the human voice wrought in letters remains a nutritious fruit for humanity.
Afiyet olsun.