If your dog could talk.

And here's Billy Collins in a similar vein:

"What is that Billy Collins poem about poets and metaphors that talks about poetry going on until everything has been compared to everything else?"

A question I asked Grok because I was listening to Mel Torme singing "Windmills of Your Mind."

Here's the poem: "The Trouble with Poetry." Excerpt: "And how will it ever end?/unless the day finally arrives/when we have compared everything in the world/to everything else in the world...."

And here's Mel:

I usually refrain from embedding song videos that only show a still image of the album cover, but that cover is worth gazing upon. Adorably absurd couple. The year was — need I say it? — 1969.

"I was working on a poem yesterday that had an epigraph from the poet Christopher Morley: 'No man is lonely while eating spaghetti.'"

"Sometimes you discover a sentence like that and say, 'I’m gonna put that on the top of a poem and see what happens.' Sometimes the epigraph is not just some cute afterthought but the reason why the poem started."

From a 2018 "Conversation with Billy Collins" (Booth), found because I was making spaghetti and remembering the epigraph, which I'd just encountered at the top of the poem "Vivace!"

I don't want to reprint an entire poem on my blog, but I will link to this other blog that did see fit to do what I won't do. You'll find the full text of "Vivace!" in a blog post titled "I Figured Out the Perfect Evening Activity."

Just released: Woody Guthrie's home recordings (from 1951).

This popped up on one of those "radio" stations Spotify concocts for you:

When did that come out? I wondered. I found this article about it, "More Woody Guthrie Songs? Yes, From a Trove of Homemade Recordings. A new, intimate album will include 13 previously unheard songs and a rewrite of 'This Land Is Your Land'" (NYT), and I see it just came out a couple weeks ago.

The first song I heard — as I was listening to a channel based on the poet Billy Collins — was "Ain't Afraid to Die." It was so strange and raw, I got my phone out to see who I was listening to, and it made perfect sense.

From the NYT article (by Jon Pareles):

After talking with Meade about the sweet potato vine he's got trailing over the edge of the deck railing...

... I had a conversation with Grok, from which I will quote only my own writing. You'll have to imagine the Grokage:

1. Am I right that in the 1950s there was a trend, among housewives, to cut off a piece of a sweet potato and use it to grow a vine, which was considered decorative? And am I right that this was inspired by a Matisse painting?

2. I'm thinking of "The Red Studio."

3. Yes, please search for 1950s primary sources (e.g., magazine articles or gardening guides) to see if there’s any mention of Matisse or The Red Studio in relation to this trend.

4. Maybe I just remember my mother's sweet potato vines and then later I connected to "The Red Studio" because the item with personal resonance was part of the rather chaotic assemblage.

5. Something in a work of art can have resonance for you that has nothing to do with what the artist had in mind. That's great, perhaps, but some people don't like interpretation that isn't grounded in the intent of the creator.

6. No, I'd like you to connect my last observation to the notion that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with the intent of the framers.

7. Now restate that point about the "living Constitution" to create resonance with the idea of the sweet potato vine twining about the 1950s kitchen or the Matisse studio. Be creative. Consider the potential for writing a poem (in the style of Billy Collins) about the memory of the sweet potato and the professionalism of judicial technique.

You can see the whole conversation here, including the poem Grok took the initiative to write.

"But she upended expectations once more, surviving and soon returning to a passion project she had been working on..."

"... a spoken-word album of recitations of classic Romantic poems. For one last time, she allowed a glimpse of the other side to inform her art, and the uncompromising tone of her voice: 'I sound more vulnerable,' she told me in an interview at the time, reflecting on her performance of Alfred Tennyson’s 'Lady of Shalott,' 'which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.'"

From "Marianne Faithfull Made an Art of Upending Expectations/The singer, who died on Thursday at 78, spent decades in the spotlight exercising a very specific and subversive power" (NYT).

You can, like me, download the entire album — "She Walks in Beauty" — here, on Spotify.

By the way, my favorite episode of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast is the one about "Lady of Shalott."

Do you listen to poetry on Spotify? Any recommendations? I was just enjoying "The Best Cigarette" yesterday. Check out "Nostalgia."

"Is calling something 'poetic' calling it a 'poem'?"

I find myself retorting to a reader, Nancy, who emailed me to say — in response to my calling something "a sincere effort at poetic polemic" — "Polemic, yes, but who would call that a poem?" 

At the link there's video of a performance called "White Privilege," which Slate called a "poem." I can see that I repeated that word, "poem," before my sentence that began with "I think": "I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic." I know I wrote "poetic polemic" to nudge the reader to question whether something that's too polemical deserves to be considered poetry. 

But, speaking of "White Privilege," isn't it white-privilege-y to question whether this set of words is a poem? I'm resisting googling "What is a poem?" but I do remember watching the "Master Class" course with Billy Collins teaching reading and writing poetry, so let me give you this from the old white man:

 

"No one else could have written that. This voice is just yours, and yours alone."

ADDED: I went back to the email to tell Nancy: "I made a poem post out of this."

And I see that Nancy has written back to me: "She calls it a poem." 

"She" is the reciter of "White Privilege," who I see I haven't yet dignified with a naming in this post, so let me say, it's Kyla Jenee Lacey.

What I wanted to learn.

I wanted to take the "Master Class" from David Sedaris, but I couldn't bring myself to pay $99 for a subscription to the app until I saw that they also had a class from Billy Collins, a poet I've liked ever since I randomly picked a book off a high shelf at Paul's Books and read one poem.

Both Sedaris and Collins, I see now, begin their writing by noticing some little thing that is present in their own life. Both teach that you ought to carry a notebook with you everywhere and jot down these little things as they happen.

That's all writing. Of course, I wanted to learn about writing, but what else? Master Class has 80+ famous people teaching how they each do their thing. I've watched 2 others, neither in the writing category. I watched Bobbi Brown, who teaches about makeup — the kind of makeup that honors whatever face you happen to have. (You do not need to "contour" your nose or "overline" your lips.) And I watched Alice Waters, the restaurateur, who says you really need to start your cooking by getting in touch with your local vegetables.

Do you see the theme of these 4, which I chose without thinking of a theme? The theme occurred to me as I was doing my sunrise run this morning. I don't listen to headphoned-in music anymore when I run. I listen to the immediate environment and let thoughts rise up from within my own head, and I got where I could see how these 4 choices represented a single desire on my part. All these lessons have to do with awareness of what is right here.

When I got back to my car, the radio was on MSNBC, which I'd listened to on my little drive out to my running place. I'd put up with Joe Scarborough angsting about Republicans being less likely  to wear masks than Democrats — what is wrong with them?! — but I didn't want that infecting me on the ride home. I clicked over to music. It was Neil Young:

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away
But there's a full moon rising
Let's go dancing in the light
We know where the music's playing
Let's go out and feel the night

Neil was getting what was for him an unusual idea: To go out and experience the moon.



I got the idea a while back to get out and experience the sunrise, to go running in the light.

“I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line.”

“Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times—and this, I think, is a sense you develop—I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum—the poem finds a reason for continuing.... The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don’t know where I’m going. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.”

Said Billy Collins, interviewed by George Plimpton in The Paris Review in 2001.

"The premise of Billy Collins’s poem 'The Afterlife' is that we all get the afterlife we believe in."

"Is it shallow to say that it’s led me to think, 'I need to switch what I believe in,' because I believe that when we die we flip off like light switches, for all eternity? I love that he imagines each different version of the afterlife with such efficient vaudeville comedy. 'The female God' is 'a woman in her forties with short wiry hair / and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.' I love that this is a funny poem about the worst thing ever. And that it’s properly unfunny in its closing lines."

Writes Ira Glass, one of the many people (mostly writers) who were asked "What’s Your Favorite Poem?" There are links to all the poems named. The Collins poem is here.

Forgetting...

... is part of remembering.

ADDED: In the comments, Galvanized says:

How cool -- so the human brain defragments itself. Cognition is so interesting! I think that this is why a prof once told me that actually making lists and actually marking off obsolete items is important, as a visual boost to jog the brain to drop old items from memory. I believe that it works, too, since list-makers seem to be more together than the rest of us.

This reminds me of one of my favorite vids of animated poetry by poet Billy Collins: