What Do Fiction Writers Do All through Poetry Month? A Broad List of Ten, Then One More

by Mandira Pattnaik

Marcos Paulo Prado

Besides FOMO. And besides being, well and truly, envious. There’s no Fiction Month. Nowhere in the world. The closest is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a yearly event where writers aim to write a 50,000-word novel in November. Is NaNoWriMo even comparable to Poetry Month? The answer is — no. For one, National Poetry Month is not just about poets aiming to write poetry — although a huge chunk of them do write poems, some committing to write one each day, so they have thirty poems to work further on by the end of April, which is amazing. Poetry Month is way more than that. Organized by the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Month is observed every year in the month of April to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry, originally only in the United States. Book releases are planned, educators plan curriculums. Local libraries and book clubs join in. Seymour Library will host a free open mic April 24, while New Orleans Public Library will organize several poetry workshops throughout the month.

2. Besides reading aloud poems. And sharing. Screenshots will do the job. Some celebrated poems, long lost from memory, will go viral. Some poems, never talked about, or from unknown origins, will find new admirers. Although some poets will have you believe otherwise. NEA Fellow and Pushcart Prize-winner, Paisley Rekdal says: I am bemused by the fact that, for a whole month otherwise highly intelligent people who are not in the least inclined to read poetry walk around in a tizzy, clutching poems to themselves that they’ve found on the internet, asking me, anxiously, whether they’re any good or, worse, whether there is any actual value to it, as if they’d just found some exotic IKEA Allen wrench and are now trying to sell it at the Antiques Road Show. But the trend will play out nevertheless. Maggie Smith, previously a little-known poet who had published her collections with tiny independent presses, was featured in the Washington Post, and on Slate, and PRI, after her poem “Good Bones” (first in Waxwing) went viral and it was called “the official poem of 2016.”

Can a fiction piece go viral like this? You bet. It’s practically impossible. A quote maybe. A page. But no more than that. Sorry, fiction lovers.

3. Besides, spending a month being perplexed by the prefix “National” in National Poetry Month. As far as anyone knows, the nation in “National” is of course the United States, but Poetry Month is no way confined to the U.S. The nature of internet means that this “national” poetry month has universal pretensions. As everyone knows, regions and cultures around the world contain a huge variety of poems. They’re free to decide when to celebrate poetry as they wish. No harm in accepting American-annual-April-appropriation. Also, as someone suggested, how about “Notional” Poetry Month?

4. Besides, hoping, some day, someone, for sure, will think of uplifting poor fiction writers with something on the same lines. Imagine what a month dedicated to the appreciation of fiction can do. Fiction Month for everyone. Fiction books shoving poetry books to the back shelves in bookstores. Something like a Fiction Foundation on the lines of The Poetry Foundation. Fiction being read aloud in audio-visual mediums. Fiction nuances being talked about. Writers encouraging each other by saying: Tell more lies in beautifully-worded sentences; weave your truth into a fabulist story; conjure up a world no one has seen before with paragraph after paragraph of make-believe; make prose read like poetry; make love sound like betrayal.

5. Besides, debating the merits between prose and poetry, while acknowledging that one is biased, even if just a little. Pondering over quotes like Prose is a museum where all the old weapons of poetry are kept, attributed by T. E. Hulme, or the one attributed to John Wain: Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

6. Besides, making a list counting the oddities of poets and fiction writers. For example, only a poet can call the GDP of Korea, Kimchi, and say that if one were to “Ferment children in a brine of Ks buried underground. They come out “kids.”” (Home Economics by Chae(lee) Dalton). While another Korean, Nobel winner fiction writer Han Kang asks: “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” in her International Man Booker winning The Vegetarian.

And, perhaps after perusing the image of The Guardian article above, of Han Kang saying what she’s quoted as saying, settling with the belief, that poet and writers, they are all a bit messed up. I mean — who can call migraines helpful?

7. Besides wondering if it is good as is now: that is, celebrate April as Poetry Month, but no Fiction Month. With Poetry Month the intimacy grows, poetry and readers are in a closed space, forced to love each other for the period of thirty days, no excuse accepted. Or at least forced to consider falling in love, like it is something like forced dating, a meeting set up by a friend you do not completely trust. What happens afterward? Does the romance remain? Will readers continue to love poetry the way they did for thirty days after the said month is over? Are they headed for marriage or break-up? Conversely, without a month, fiction writers and their readers are never “officially” engaged. They are floating mutual admirers, almost in a long-distance relationship, where one puts up the pretense of intimacy but never really gets too close. Because fiction writers and fiction readers are never caged together, they can still experience the thrill of chase, the blink-and-miss flirtations, the liberty of choosing to remain or let go.

8. Besides, visiting oneself. Where do we stand in the state of the world? As poets? As fiction writers? What does it mean to exist in this age of turmoil? What are our choices? Where are we headed? As a citizen of a country where GDP per capita is $2,940, but then, irony is, 50% survive on $3 per day. Then, hearing the hoopla of being the fifth-largest economy by overall GDP. How does it compare with AWP 2025 conference, which attracted approximately 12,000 attendees, and was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center? Compare and contrast at your own peril — fiction writers and poets included. Assuming a conservative estimate of 600 exhibitors, at a conservative average booking charge paid for each booth or table ($800), the rough revenue generated, only from renting booths and tables, was $480,000 in just 4 days.

9. Besides, perhaps, falling for the bait and learning to write a few poems anyway. What harm? For example, many fiction writers are exceedingly innovative with their formatting, and go to great lengths with lyricisms and metaphors. That’s poetry. Some have also found middle grounds in “Narrative Poems,” “Hybrid Poetry” and “Prose Poems.” They all count to raise your hand as a practitioner of the written word celebrating poetry.

10. Besides using available poetry to get “inspired” to write fiction. Like Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznic. Inspired by the verse, letters, films, and interviews of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Or reading some recent books that blend fiction and poetry. First in this line would be Gwenda, Rodney by Olivia Cronk (2024) described as genre-ambiguous “poetry novel.” Then, Wrong Norma by poet Anne Carson, a hybrid prose book, though described as a poetry collection by many, spanning multiple genres. Some pages resemble a scrapbook, passages spliced and replaced, something of a palimpsest, some blurry or otherwise hard to read.

What do fiction writers do all through Poetry Month then, besides these? They find a thing called procrastination, and take a bit of rest.