April was National Poetry Month and it proved to be an exciting and surprising and wretched month for me.

Many poets will take the 30/30 challenge – writing a poem a day for every day in April. I didn’t set out to do this but I ended up writing 39 poems in April which was really surprising. I attended several poetry workshops, including the one I lead for Split This Rock, and I went to the Barrelhouse one-day literary conference. All of these things helped push me to write a lot this month.

I participated in several events for Thou Art, the book of identity poems that are paired with original drawings – you can still order your copy but hurry, quantities are limited! I was also the resident poet for Arlington library’s The Poet Is In which meant I hung out at the library and wrote poems on the spot for people.

Several close friends of mine got amazing publishing news – my friend Kristin Ryan’s poem, Morning, With Bandages, won the Jabberwock Review’s 2017 Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ prize for poetry. My friend Hannah Cohen’s chapbook, Bad Anatomy, was accepted for publication by Glass Poetry Press. And I was so fantastically excited for them. I’m a firm believer in supporting other poets and these are two women I admire and whose poems I love.

But then the wretched part: I received more rejections in April than I have in any other month. EVER. One day I received three rejections. On a Monday. *sigh* Yeah, it was a bad day. =( I know that rejections are part of the process. And without rejections there wouldn’t be acceptances, this is how it goes. But damn, I got only one acceptance, and that was of a previously published poem. Which I’m happy about but it would have been nice to have one new poem accepted.

So April is gone and now it’s May. It’s time to send new poems out and hopefully this month, a few more will get accepted.