The Woodlot

By Tanis MacDonald

It’s a weird creature, Poetry Month, with its earnest poem-a-day prompts and urges to read more poetry, its many sponsored readings and the always-beautifully designed LCP posters advocating that teachers get their students involved. It’s a lot, as people who would hate that I am quoting them say.  Working poets, those of us who write and publish all year around no matter what the month, either love or hate Poetry Month, not so much because of the poetry but because we are used to flying under the cultural radar and April seems to shout at us, “Show yourself!” And we cringe. As Chris Banks put it in another essay, “beauty is embarrassing” and so is faith in beauty, or at least letting others know that you have such faith despite…everything. So, when I say that I have written a poem a day every April since 2013, the embarrassment potential is high. Good thing I spend several hours a week talking in front of young people: a sure-fire way to learn to be less embarrassed about almost everything. Almost.  

Thirty days each April multiplied by twelve years = 360 poems. That’s a full circle, or nearly every day in a single calendar year, or the temperature that most casseroles are cooked at.

This is a boast, but it’s also the kind of thing I say when I can’t quite believe it myself: equal parts humblebrag and incredulity. It’s not important that you believe it; it’s only important that you wonder about the possibility. If you don’t want to wonder about the possibility, that’s okay too but maybe get yourself a snack? Whenever I don’t want to hear about possibility, I have low blood sugar and am much more optimistic after eating an orange. And if you do decide to eat an orange, could you send some of that peel spritz my way? I love its tang in my nostrils.

Some context: in 2013, I was in my sixth year of living far from the literary communities I had spent decades cultivating, working on my fourth poetry book in the time I could squeak away from my day job, which wasn’t much.  A creative loneliness blew through me in a cold wind, no matter what the season. It felt like my brain was on permanent winter. But then, the same year that I wrote a book proposal, I broke my leg and learned to walk with a cane. I took gigs as a visiting scholar and got to meet up with poet friends and to meet new ones in the UK. My poetry brain began to thaw, just a little, even though it was the coldest spring on record in Yorkshire.

I began raggedly. I was determined to write a poem each day but in a hazy kind of way, notebooking my way through the mornings and not getting anywhere much on the page. That is, I wouldn’t call anything I wrote in the spring 2013 a poem. My notebook from that spring is filled with what at best could be called musings and at worst, dreck.  

If I was unimpressed with what I wrote, words that tottered around my notebook like the poetic equivalent of stick-people, I was also unimpressed with myself. Left to my own devices, I proved that I could write every day but when I did, I wrote crap. Still, I had done what not everyone does; I kept going in the face of blah. I accepted my own ineptness in the moment.

Keep in mind that this was not a young person with a fresh dewy mind excoriating themselves at not being instantly good at something new; in 2013, I was the author of four books, though I hadn’t had a book of poetry out since 2008. Suffice to say, I had a practice and a discipline, or at least I thought I did. I was puzzled at the remarkably bland insides of my own head.

Poets, you know this: at the bare minimum, your own writing shouldn’t bore you.  

During my first NaPoWriMo, I didn’t feel freed creatively, or especially challenged; I felt dogged, a familiar feeling and not one that I needed to write for thirty days to experience. When the end of the month rolled around, I heaved a shoulder-shrug of “who the hell knows?” and moved on.

But then I blinked and it was suddenly late March 2014. And I wanted to try again. The idea of actually having a good time writing a poem a day remained tantalizing, especially after blahing out so much the previous year. Like people forget the pain of giving birth, I forgot about the sludginess of my first Poem-a-Day April and decided I’d do it again.

I needed a plan, and I was very scientific about it. First, I shouted into my Facebook feed that I was starting an online group for people who wanted to take on this experiment. It was March 29. Ten or so poets, of all ages and backgrounds, answered and I whipped up a private group site and a name: I called the group the Electronic Garret. We began writing together, from the same prompt with encouragement to do one’s own thing at any time with no judgment, on April 1, 2014. We stayed together, attempting a poem a day each April, from then until 2023. The group is still together, under a different name and leadership. I needed to step back after nearly a decade of helming the Garret, and abdicating the leadership was not so hard. Every functioning group has several people who can potentially lead it, and sure enough, two other leaders stepped up as I stepped down. 

So, what’s to be gleaned from all this?   

Reading Samanatha Irby – who is a goddess, and I will die on this hill so come fight me – has reminded me that people love a list. Some people loooooove a list. (Me.) Here’s my list of take-aways for the poem-a-day curious: a list of fun facts, hard truths, and esoterica with titles.    

The scheduling

I plotted out a space every day when I would write. I loved to do it first thing in the morning, but that wasn’t always possible. The year I chaired my department and inherited administrative responsibilities that I had never heard of the year before, I wrote on my lunch hour, during the strange administrative “dead time” between 2:30-3:30, and sometimes while in my car driving home, reciting a single line over and over until I could burst through my door at home and write it down. Sometimes I blocked off writing time in my day calendar, and it was cool to see it glowing there with all the less exciting stuff.

The prompts

It’s great to have a reliable prompt source, but no prompt source is perfect, and the official NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo prompts are hit and miss. I mean no disrespect to those who are likely paid almost nothing to produce them, but I would be lying if I said they always spoke to me. Or maybe they always speak to me, but sometimes they say, “Nope.”

The cappuccino

But there’s no getting away from that fact that “write every day” is deeply classist advice that presumes that someone else is going to be doing your work while you daydream over cappuccino (maybe even bringing you said cappuccino) coupled with bourgeois white-lady notions of “soothing one’s soul” with “me time.” Not gonna lie, some daily prompt sites can emit that scent. It can be overpowering sometimes, and kind of gross. Know that as you start, and when you run into that one prompt that gets your back up, you can either a) wrassle that thing to the ground and make it your own, or b) take off in the opposite direction and write something else. Then drink whatever hot beverage you want and go do the other stuff in your life.  

The brain space

I teach anywhere from 70-250 students per university term. With the cessation of classes in late March/early April, I get a piece of my brain back. That is, with the scent of snow mold and dried grass, part of my consciousness that is reserved for caring for crowds of young people, patiently answering the same questions over and over, planning lessons and answering 20-30 emails a day, choosing outfits that are not too casual and not too intimidating, travelling back and forth to campus, planning and packing meals, and the actual standing in front of people talking for hours, with all that suddenly NOT happening, space opens up in my head. Oh hello, poetry.   

The undercurrent

Every poem-a-day April, an undercurrent will make itself known to me by day 4 or 5, maybe even earlier. Maybe you’re like me; most of the time, I don’t know what’s on my mind. But suddenly, with no conscious intention, I will write the same poem – that is, different poems that worry the same subject – several times in a row. This is not a bad thing. It’s how books get written. The aphorism “the poem knows better than I do” is as true as any true thing.

The failure

Going into April with a project is a guarantee that I’ll write about anything and everything else but that project. 

Humble pie is very tasty.

The opportunity to low-stakes fail every day is strangely energizing.

The scofflaw

Going rogue is a boss move.

The genre slide

Going hybrid is a boss move, too. When is a poem an essay, and when is an essay a poem?

The influences

I read a lot of poetry and jump off the diving boards that great poets build over empty swimming pools.

I read a lot of poetry and then toss the book aside and write from the alpha waves the book has whipped up in my brain.

To paraphrase John Irving about wrestling: I get influenced and stay influenced.

The incidental

Thee’s no denying that such a poem-a-day pursuit is entirely arbitrary, and so is the month of April. But committing to the caprice of it all has been useful for honing practice and concentration. At residences or retreats when my time is limited and my ambitions large, it’s good to have that practice at my back to lean back on, like poetic lumber support.

*

I wrote a poem a day in April last year on my own, with casual encouragement from a few friends, who I casually encouraged in return. In truth, my brain was a glorious space for those thirty days.  

What do you do with 360 poems? I thought of printing them out and making a fort of them, sewing them into a dress, crinkling them into a cat bed. 

A book, or several, is the obvious answer. And that has happened for some of them, will happen for others, but not all, because the most important thing to remember about writing a poem a day for thirty days is that they will not all be good. Nor should they be. Some poems are drafts that I will never look at again. Some will intrigue me enough to return to them later, and some will become cornerstones of future manuscripts. But all of that – including publishing (yeah, I said it) – matters less than the illogical chance to flex that muscle every day, to see the giddy space on the calendar that reads “3:00-3:45 – write poem.” Every day in April, I think “That’s ridiculous” and every day in April, I do it anyway.

Last night, I reviewed Chen Chen’s indispensable prompt list, “You must Use the Word Smoothie.” I am currently amassing my stack of go-to poetry books – books that I choose specifically for how they will spark up my brain – and cackling with unalloyed glee. Bring it, April.

Tanis MacDonald (she/her) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female as well as six other books of poetry and nonfiction. She is twice the winner of the Open Seasons Award: once in 2021 for her essay on female friendship and music fandom, and again in 2025 for her essay on adoption and ancestry, forthcoming in The Malahat Review. Her next book of poetry, Tall, Grass, Girl, will be published by Book*hug Press in 2026.