Tell Us All the Gossip You Know

(How I was introduced at a writer’s club in small-town USA)

Gulp.

I’m a reader not a gossiper.

But we know you know some. So tell it.

Gulp.

Robert Bly said writing a bad poem before breakfast every day is a good habit.

He did it in honor of his old friend Bill Stafford

(who also did it) after Bill died.

The poems were never bad, by the way.

They were great.

There were a lot of them.

You could work on them later, after you ate.

Leonard Nathan, chairman of the Department of

Rhetoric

at UC Berkeley, worried computers might diminish

one’s investment in a line. If you could just erase the line instantly, and insert a new one—

well, it might be too easy.

Mary Oliver wanted to smell flowering pink bushes and blossoming trees in Texas.

Pull over, she said, at more than one corner. She needed to absorb the scents.

A city wasn’t just a name.

In her presence, babies might sing for the first time.

She is like that.

Ernest Hemingway ate an apple before writing.

This might or might not have explained his crisp, short sentences.

In the house where he died in Idaho, his shaving cream still sits inside the medicine cabinet.

Ruth Stone wore a pale shimmering prom dress from—1930?—1940?—

to her poetry reading in Texas in the 1990s.

She said the dress was lonely hanging in her closet and wanted to be used.

Josephine Miles, who traveled with her wheelchair around the country to read poems,

said, Don’t make your poem a neat package with a bow tied at the end. She also said,

It’s hard to help.

Anyone can visit Walt Whitman’s birthing corner on Long Island.

The guide points and says, There, right there, he was born.

Some visitors can’t move on quickly

to the next room.

They are hypnotized.

What if Walt had never left this corner or stepped out into the streets

to do and say all he did?

Then who would we be?

Genine Lentine said she’d like to ban the word “flow”—I don’t understand this

but respect her, so think about it. What’s wrong with “flow”? Are your thoughts

flowing? Your words flowing? What’s up with this, Genine?

She does not care

for haiku.

William Burroughs also believed in taking Vitamin C.

Ken Kesey wore a Mexican serape and said Jack Kerouac got trapped in his “own little

box”—that was his downfall. Can we really say anyone who changed so many lives

had a downfall?

He just drank too much alcohol and had a shorter life than he might have had.

Jack’s box was pretty vast.

William Goyen said writing started with trouble—

what you never worked out yet—just start there.

That thing in the street when you were seventeen?

Make it a story.

There is only one known video of Mark Twain, wearing a white linen suit in 1909,

walking outside a house in Connecticut,

talking with Thomas Edison.

Daria Donnelly’s last essay was about “literature of empathy.” Why we need it in our crazy world.

Don’t put any Americans in your story for American kids, maybe.

Don’t make them heroes or villains, if you do.

On her tombstone she wanted

NEVER TASTED COCA-COLA.

Garth Williams got a letter from his close friend Margaret Wise Brown after she died.

It traveled from Europe so it took a while.

When I visited Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst,

a lively plump robin was sitting on her step,

right under the second-story window she would have stared out of.

John Steinbeck

would sharpen

twenty-four pencils every day

and write

till they were

dull.