Isles Poetica

What if there was an Island where poets could go and write poetry all day, all night? They could sit on the sand and write without a pc, no electricity, by firelight, and the old fashioned way: using a quill. There would be one store: The Ink and Papyrus Exchange, also stocked with writer necessities like extra unattached muses, inspiration in a bag, and for newer writers, vocabulary in a can.

The weather would be inclement all the time, high winds, raging seas, a few odd looking owls in the palm trees for contrast (and to make owlckbrg feel at home). Poets love high waves and tumultuous seas, a mirror to their internal environments. We rage against the world, rant from time to time (perpetually for some of us, myself included in this aggregate) and find solace in the wind pushing sand in our eyes.

Autumn comes and the season changes. It is past due time to hit the boats and, if none are available, swim to the Island of Poets. If you want to prose, you can take a canoe to the next Island over where it is rumored that Poe, Tom Clancy, and Hemingway's ghosts hang out and give lectures on poetry. It only costs $1,000.00 per day because as you know you can make money from poetry.

The Island is open 24/6, on the seventh day we collapse in big puppy piles on the wet shoals and count the sea shells that have been abandoned in the sand. This is how poets rejeuvenate themselves after a hard writing marathon. A few commit acts of love making in public, some with themselves, exhibitionist flock to poetry, you know. A few burned out poets set up a battery powered projector and show old films of Rome burning. The aroma of the sea mixes well with the smell of so many feet. There are at least sixty poets in attendance at all times and yes, the waiting list is a published tome, six inches thick. If you have prerequisites, yes, there are rabbits.

The painters have an Island, and the Sculptors have and Island, but the empty Island has cannibals (can't spell cannabals) where the playrights scream a lot. The musicians, mostly rappers, have a small continent that accomodates all the newcomers to the spit set. A graveyard is there for Chopin and Leonard Bernstein to have graves to turn over in. They occasionally rise and compliment Jay-Z on inventive composition and orchestration and to wish they had lived during the time of the Boomers and Millennials.

Stay as long as you like or until your cash runs out, but learn the ways of the force, Luke - sorry, wrong genre.

slc

10-05-14

127a