April is National Poetry Month and this is the 4 year anniversary of this blog, roughly

April is the cruelest month breeding blogposts out of the dead land about how April is National Poetry Month.  This month is the 18th we've shared as a nation since 1996 that has involved poetry.

There are many 21st-century phenomena that strike me as arbitrary, sinister or generally just a bad idea, and, while I am still out on whether the internet as a whole has been a complete catastrophe for our culture, I am certain that it has bestowed upon us a whole new genres of arbitrary, sinister and generally just bad ideas.

And perhaps it has been a trope of print media for decades to decide the time is right to re-evaluate a work due to an anniversary, or a national x month, and perhaps it's even less sinister than retroactive analysis in honor of a re-issue or new edition or some other commerce-related decision (though much poetry is released in April to capitalize on the hubbub) to reappraise a piece of writing, cinema, music, television, etc. but a critical mass has been reached of essays beginning "Does y hold up after z years" or "April is National Poetry Month," and thus the writing something that will be as irrelevant as poetry come May, or when it is no longer 25 years to the day after—somehow attaching the writing to a past moment when quality media actually mattered to its culture and thus gaining a gravitas that otherwise is not found in today's internet-print culture that is designed like an off-the-wall calendar, a factoid a day that can easily fit into cubicle culture, in this case that can be linked to a friend's facebook page who likes, for example, poetry—and it's his month, after all, so let's celebrate. It may be a ludicrous and cynical conclusion to make, but I shall make it—anything that has a specific month to celebrate "its vital place in American culture" does not have a vital place in American culture, for it is a culture dominated by everything we know we are not supposed to celebrate, a list too depressing to produce in this moment.

It is no longer the writer's priority to write something because the thought occurred and developed a month, or however long, before, just as we don't communally watch the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan Show anymore, we watch gimmicky karaoke programs that promise talented people the possibility of being chosen to join the schlock machine.  We publish for the anniversaries, we post in time for our pieces to be cherry-picked and linked cubicle to cubicle, in honor of whatever arbitrary subculture or past text we are told to celebrate in that moment, to give our meaningless laptop interactions some vague feeling of significance.

Unfortunately, I stopped writing poems every day as part of a project that began in September, just at the beginning of April.  I could have really cashed in on this gimmick.

I am pleased to announce, however, that the Seinfeld-related material of this blog will become available in book form on May 14th, the 15th anniversary of the series finale.

I am slightly vindicated to have found this quite eloquent anti-Poetry Month poem by Charles Bernstein: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html

It seems this subject is quite popular, and most blogs, apparently, begin as mine has:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2004/04/08/the-cruelest-and-coolest-month.html

http://paxamericana.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/its-national-poetry-month-and-richard-howard-doesnt-care/

http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/127408/april-the-poetry-month-some-highlights/

etc.