The poet T. S. Eliot, famous for being an anagram of Toilets, once wrote "April is the cruellest month." I've oft explained that I think Eliot was very wrong in this observation, because February is the cruellest month. But I might agree that April is the crewelist month, mainly because my partner seems to have acquired at least a dozen skeins of yarn in the past few weeks. Generally speaking, she likes to spend her evenings knitting and reading interesting stories on the Internet, which I guess proves that she really enjoys a good yarn.
What she doesn't enjoy, in spite of her yarn affinity, is when I loom over her, especially if I begin needling her about whatever she's reading. What can I say; not everyone appreciates my warped sense of humor. She would prefer that I go upstairs and weave some stories of my own instead.
And it's a good time for it, because April is National Poetry Month. For those who tremble in fear at the mention of poetry, it may seem that Eliot's initial analysis was correct. (Analyzing his initials ... T.S.: Terrifying Stuff) Not all of poetry is such an inhospitable Waste Land. There are as many kinds of poetry as there are of movies, and you rarely hear someone say, "Oh, I don't really like movies." But you do sometimes hear people say, "Oh, I don't really like poetry." Or even "Oh, I don't really like when Seth puts words in my mouth." The point that I am making here is this:
A poem or a movie is
Because people like different types of movies, and while I may not understand why a movie about a Hangover would need to be made at all, let alone require a sequel, apparently many people enjoy that sort of thing. But even if the worst series of novels of the century is made into a film franchise (I'm looking at you, sparkly glampires and stalker-loving protagonists), it would not diminish my enthusiasm for high-brow intellectual films where mutants with metal claws and laser beam eyes fight against flying magnetic men and magical juggernauts.
Which I guess goes to prove the old saying, one man's flying magnetic mutant is another man's sparkly vampire. Or possibly there was something about poisoned meat; I never actually listened to the old sayings very carefully.
But I listen to poetry carefully, and for this month, that will have to be good enough. My head filled with windowside ravens, red wheelbarrows, burning tigers, and brave Viking warriors, it occurs to me that over the years, the world's poets have probably spun even more yarns than the world's weavers.
But I don't want to knit-pick.
Seth Brown is a humor writer whose longest poem is a line-by-line translation of the first five books of the Bible into rhyming couplets, From God To Verse. His shortest poem explores existentialism: "I sigh." His work appears weekly in the Transcript, and weakly on RisingPun.com.
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