What better way to celebrate April as National Poetry Month?
Soon, in Eureka Springs, a gathering of poets from surrounding states and Arkansas will begin the annual Lucidity Poetry Retreat held at the Inn of the Ozarks. The first session is at night on a Tuesday (non- season rooms are less expensive then) with workshops, lectures, read-arounds, renewal of friendships and beginnings of new ones.
The final meeting is always on a Thursday night with the Awards Banquet, but many of us will prolong our goodbyes at a local cantina.
Poets from Arkansas, Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma will travel here, not only to enjoy the seasonal spring flowerings, but also to renew inspiration, to perhaps gain new techniques for writing, and to savor the ambience and fellowship of like-minded folk.
Laughter and conversations around tables at Myrtie Mae’s restaurant or Sparky’s will enrich the experience further. New friends become old friends and old friends become "family."
On the last afternoon, the group is free to ride the trolley, visit the masseuse, the flea markets, the trinket shops downtown, Thorncrown Chapel, Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge, attend an additional read-around session, or to nap.
As usual for the past few years, I’ll soon be a resident of the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow for a week, which will include the poetry retreat. Besides writing, organizing, editing on the non-Lucidity days, I will stop in at the hospital’s Purple House thrift shop, the Echo and what used to be The Red Barn—all favorite places to pick up bargains in books and other things that please my eye.
Since last year, I have made Facebook friends with Dan K., so I’ll visit his workplace and several other places he’s suggested in his newspaper columns. Oh, and the Railway Winery out past Holiday Island—I’ll have to go see friends Vicki and Greg. I will make sure to pick up an issue of the Lovely County Citizen, which is full of writing ideas.
Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the U. S. has written a clever, more-truthful-than-not, poem, called
INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
[from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, by Billy Collins]
