"...and a merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!"
Clement Clarke Moore
A good meeting. I urge you to check out the link to Billy Collins and read the article and listen to the clips of him speaking and reading. I’m still looking for the Neruda film. The impetus for the assignment for January 5 comes from my readings about writers’ block. Someone suggested that when you are having difficulty getting started that you write as if speaking to someone to whom you feel close or who you admire. Talk about anything so long as you are writing. I added the part about explaining why you write. I know that I tell different people different things about what I write and why I write. I cannot tell the mailman what I tell my mentors nor can I tell my mentors what I tell my dog but I talk to all of them. And good luck with the pangrams!
Poets’ Roundtable
Welcome
News and Jabber
I begin with something dear to my heart-- the false start, the failed beginnings and even writers’ block:
“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’” — Maya Angelou
Billy Collins on poems he rejected:
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/504716937/billy-collins-on-how-to-become-a-poet-and-why-poetry-can-be-a-game This link includes several clips of Billy Collins reading and speaking about poetry.
"Usually I know enough not to finish those," he said. "They announce themselves as failures early on, four or five or six lines in. They're just not cooperating with me – they're not showing any signs of wanting to go anywhere, or it was just a bad idea to start with, you know, like you just invited the wrong person to the party but it's too late. But in the case of writing a poem the waste basket ... the writer's best friend ... is full of false starts.
"When I was a younger poet I would do what Frost said you can't do, which is fret a poem into being ... and I gave up on that a long time ago. If a poem isn't working, if it doesn't feel right, I just let it go and get on with the next thing, which could be writing another poem or making more toast."
But time spent on poems destined for the trash heap isn't always time wasted.
Billy Collins: When Does Creativity Start And End?
When Does Creativity Start And End?
"If I'm writing for a while and I'm writing maybe a failure and another failure ... a poem will come, often a little poem," he said. "It has nothing to do with what I've written but it would not have occurred had I not been failing."
COSMOLOGY
By Billy Collins
AUDIO: Read by the author.
I never put much stock in that image of the earth
resting on the backs of four elephants
who are standing on the back of a sea turtle,
who is in turn supported by an infinite regression
of turtles disappearing into a bottomless forever.
I mean how could you get them all to stay still?
Now that we are on the subject,
my substitute picture would have the earth
with its entire population of people and things
resting on the head of Keith Richards,
who is holding a Marlboro in one hand
and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other.
As long as Keith keeps talking about
the influence of the blues on the Rolling Stones,
the earth will continue to spin merrily
and revolve in a timely manner around the sun.
But if he changes the subject or even pauses
too long, it’s pretty much curtains for us all.
Unless, of course, one person somehow survives
being hurtled into the frigidity of outer space;
then we would have a movie on our hands—
but wait, there wouldn’t be any hands
to write the script or make the movie,
and no theatres, either, no buttered popcorn, no giant Pepsi.
Putting that aside, let’s imagine Keith
standing on the other Rolling Stones,
who are standing on the shoulders of Muddy Waters,
and, were it not for that endless stack of turtles,
one on top of the other all the way down,
Muddy Waters would be standing on nothing at all.
Billy Collins, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, will publish “The Rain in Portugal,” his twelfth book of poems, in October.
If you have a regular schedule your subconcious will prepare itself to be ready to be productive at that time. You will find that you can write more and write more efficiently.
Pablo Neruda
“Neruda” is a new movie that traces the year 1948 in his life. It is reaping terrific reviews and is directed by the same director, Pablo Larrain, as “Jackie”, an astoundingly good film about Jackie Kennedy. If you can find “Neruda” (or “Jackie”) anywhere, let me know. Here’s a link to a review: http://www.thewrap.com/neruda-review-gael-garcia-bernal/ and another:http://www.thewrap.com/neruda-cannes-review-pablo-larrains-anti-biopic-stumbles-then-soars/
The Current Assignment
Kind of a non-directional thing that somewhat reflected my own writing the time. I then went through several days of false starts (which is why I began with what I began with above). I genuinely thought I would not write anything decent this season. I was wrong, delightfully wrong.
The Next Assignment
Write a poem to someone who is important to you telling why you write.
The Next Meeting
Other Jabber
Try writing sentences using all the letters of the alphabet.
Post-truth politics and the poet. How necessary is truth? Is this Orwellian reality? Consider the Yahoo hacking.
