National Poetry Month - Whittney Jones - ARTSCO Guest Blogger
When asked to write a piece about National Poetry Month, I felt the familiar sense of
imposter syndrome that so often comes when I sit down to write. Am I qualified to be the person
writing this piece? Does what I have to say really matter in the grand scheme of things? Will my
subject be one important enough to merit attention (and, of course, that little voice in the back of
my head squeaking: am I even really a poet)? Of course, I then asked myself: what even is
poetry? What makes it important? What about it do I need to convince my reader is true?
Especially these days considering that it seems that the debate about whether or not poetry is
dead so often goes in and out of circulation.
I think I can at least say, with some conviction, that it’s certainly not dead. Maybe it
doesn’t get the same kind of attention it used to receive. Maybe it’s more true that only poets
read poetry than it once was. Maybe even its political impact isn’t as powerful as it once was.
I’ve certainly heard my fair share of people tell me that they didn’t even know poetry was still a
thing someone does anymore when I told them that my master’s degree was in poetry.
But I would argue, in this month of April, which was, for several years in a row, the
absolute worst month of my life, that poetry is, and will remain, a vital piece of the human
experience—even if you don’t always know that what you’re seeing or hearing is poetry. My
argument for this is based in my own personal experience. Even when I lost my passion for most
things in my life, poetry was the one way I had to reconnect to the living. It was my lifeline to
tell a story I absolutely had to tell in order to go forward and come back to some semblance of
who I once was.
“Even when I lost my passion for most things in my life, poetry was the one way I had to reconnect to the living. It was my lifeline to tell a story I absolutely had to tell in order to go forward and come back to some semblance of who I once was.”
As most of these stories begin, I considered myself a writer from a very young age. I had
notebooks upon notebooks filled with stories as I grew up. In reality, I was a very terrible writer
until much later on, after I had attended grad school and finally began to understand how to
really form poetry. I won some prizes, I published a chapbook—I thought I was, you know, fairly
well on my way to that mythical title of POET, and then, in April 2018, my life fell apart. My
three-year-old was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of childhood lung cancer, and it was
advanced. Nothing about who I was before mattered anymore, except what made me mom. I was
determined to be super mom. I was going to fix absolutely everything I could. I was going to
focus every bit of my energy on making sure that my daughter could focus on being a child as
much as possible and despite all of the horrible things she had to go through. This involved a lot
of compartmentalizing. I didn’t have the time or the luxury to process my feelings as we went
through the treatments and surgeries, the radiation and relapses—and, always, the relapses in
April.
“April, the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot so correctly defined it.”
Things I had once cared about became unimportant. All that mattered was saving my
daughter’s life. So, we fought it for almost three years. She was five-years-old when she passed
away in October of 2020, and my life fell apart all over again, except in a much worse, more
impossible way to explain. Suddenly, I had no identity. I was not mom—my most important title
of all. I was no one without her. She was my daughter, but also my best friend. Everything I did,
we did together. I couldn’t imagine going forward without her. I withered and receded into
myself. I spent day after day barely moving from bed or couch, where I alternated between
crying and trying to distract myself with mindless tv shows. I didn’t think that I would ever feel
hope or happiness again. Part of me even bitterly refused to believe that it could even be possible
without her. I lost all of the passion I had for things that used to make me happy, like poetry.
People kept telling me to write about it, and I kept saying to myself: no, I’ll never write again.
There’s nothing worth saying without her here.
Then a year passed, and finally I wasn’t crying every single day anymore. I think I finally
started processing some of the trauma. I was able to look back and really consider everything we
had been through, and through that, slivers of myself started to return—the desire to write came
back to me, and maybe more fiercely than ever. I wanted to tell people what we had been
through. I wanted people to understand what that nightmare was like, what my daughter had to
endure until the very end. I wanted to bring awareness to the cold, hard realities of childhood
cancer. I wanted more people to care. Research funding for childhood cancer is pitiful. I needed
more people to care. I had to tell her story.
The only way I really knew how to do this was by writing, and now, more than I ever had
in my life, I felt like I finally really understood the importance of poetry. Poetry can be the truest
representation of the human experience. It was the only vehicle I had that could allow me to
explore the devastation I had experienced in a way that could also, hopefully, connect with
others. It allowed me to indirectly approach the things that were too painful to say out loud, or,
perhaps, too impossible to vocalize. It helped me find a way back. It’s how we tell our stories
and how our stories live on after us.
“Poetry can be the truest representation of the human experience.”
I have since wanted to share this power of poetry with everyone I could. Here—! Here is
the way that we can find therapy and some semblance of peace. Poetry is the place where you
can go to be not so alone, a place where you are not the only one who has suffered or is
suffering. There is kinship here. We can find connection here in an otherwise rather emotionally
disconnected world. Poetry is where we can say the things that we don’t feel like we can say
aloud. Even if you don’t believe that you can write it, there is a poem out there that will speak to
you and what you’re going through. There is solace to be found.
So, for National Poetry Month 2023, I wanted to share some of my favorite poems with
you all in hopes that you can find a voice that speaks to you, even if you feel like you are
currently experiencing the darkest time of your life. There is poetry out there that touches every
subject, every dark corner of our lives, waiting to embrace us. Poetry is not dead. It’ll live as
long as we all do, and, hopefully, you will find more reasons to seek it out. This month, take
moments to find poems that speak to you. Google them, find a poetry book in a bookstore, listen
to the poets read their work on Youtube. You won’t regret this time you took for yourself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Whittney Jones is the author of The Old Works (The Heartland Review Press, 2019), a poetry chapbook. Her poems have been published in Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, and Zone 3, among others. She was winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award in the 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition. Jones was chosen by State Poet Laureate, Angela Jackson, to be an Ambassador of Poetry for Illinois in 2022. She lives in southern Illinois raising goats, chickens, and ducks with her husband.