April’s ablaze with blossoms and a-flurry with breezes

 

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]

April -- Tax season, spring and National Poetry Month

 

PL, dining room at Couchwood

 

 

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR POETS?

 WHO AM I?

 I WAS BORN  ELEANORE MARIE IN 1912 IN BELGIUM, the daughter of a science historian.
 

 We moved to the US when I was four. I grew up in Cambridge Mass., and began writing poetry as a teenager.
 

 After a period of aspiring to be an actress in New York—and failing—I continued to write. I traveled to Europe frequently and met Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden among others.
 

 My writing career took off during the 1930s—while I was in my early twenties. My first volume of poetry was “Encounters in April” and was published in 1937.                   [I hear now that copies are worth $88 on Amazon, and $150 and $200 on ABE books. All I can say is ‘wow!’ And let that be a lesson to you who are hearing this. All sorts of things can happen after you no longer live on this planet.]
 

 I also wrote a novel, which was published. Around this time, I worked as an instructor and lecturer at a number of schools. I even wrote an autobiographical volume at age 47. [Don’t ever think you’re too old to begin writing; you’re not. Why, I hear there’s a 93-year-old Missouri woman who had her first novel published recently!]
 

 I spent my later years in York, Maine, by the sea. I wrote four memoirs all told. My last book of poetry, “Coming Into Eighty” was published when I was 81. [I understand it is much cheaper to buy this volume online—even as little as one cent—plus shipping, of course.] Two years later, during the summer, I took my last breath.
 

 Here is one of my poems:

 

A GLASS OF WATER

 

Here is a glass of water from my well.

It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;

It is the best I have, my only spell,

And it is cold, and better than champagne.

Perhaps someone will pass this house one day

To drink, and be restored, and go his way,

Someone in dark confusion as I was

When I drank down cold water in a glass,

Drank a transparent health to keep me sane,

After the bitter mood had gone again.

~~M. S.