1. I belong to a Billy Collins Facebook group. Recently, a member of that group posted a link to a video of Harvard professor and highly esteem poetry scholar Helen Vendler giving an hour long lecture on John Keats' ode, "To Autumn" -- the very same ode Billy Collins discussed last Friday in the broadcast that has disappeared from the World Wide Web -- no one knows what happened. She gave this lecture in 1980.
If Billy Collins' ten to fifteen minute discussion of "To Autumn" cracked open the door of the poem for me, Vendler's lecture blew the door wide open -- and I've only listened to about twenty minutes of it so far. I'll just say that, so far, Vendler's emphasis is on the various means Keats structures or organizes the poem and that these means of organization are inseparable from the the ideas about autumn (and beyond) that Keats explores through the arrangement of the poem's stanzas and its images.
Next up: finish listening to Helen Vendler's lecture and, on down the road, listen to other lectures available on the World Wide Web she's given -- I'm most interested in what she has to say about Wallace Stevens.
I also listened to the Billy Collins Poetry Broadcast today. Billy further introduced us to the jazz of Art Pepper. He read some Ron Padgett poems and then read two of his own poems, both satirizing Wordsworth and others: "Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey" and "Lines Written at Flying Point Beach".
2. I was locked into listening to Helen Vendler, but happily took off my headphones when Debbie told me she'd fixed us some dinner. She combined noodles, clams, diced tomatoes, garlic, fresh basil, and red pepper flakes and topped this dish with freshly grated Parmesan cheese. It was an extraordinary meal.
3. Bill Davie's Tree House Concert tonight was exceptional. Bill kept telling us he felt weird, but what I experienced was straight up Bill Davie honesty as he performed his songs with verve and read several of his poems. His voice broke from time to time as the words he wrote and the memories his poems brought up for him moved him. Jeff Steve and I talked on the phone after the concert and agreed that it was an awesome concert and that we both admired Bill's emotional authenticity and his prolific artistry.
Jeff and I finished our conversation and I joined Debbie so we could watch Gene Hackman starring in Francis Ford Coppola's brilliant movie, The Conversation. I've watched this movie now at least a dozen times and I've always zeroed in on Gene Hackman's work bringing the damaged character Harry Caul to life. Debbie was attuned to Harry Caul's character, too, and she also watched the movie as a crime story, drawing upon her vast experience watching crime shows, especially over the last 10-15 years. Debbie's questions and comments after the movie about the movie's central crime enlarged my experience with this movie and got me thinking about aspects of it that I hadn't given much thought before. I enjoyed puzzling over her questions and comments a lot -- and am ready, some day, to watch this movie again for about the 800th time!
Here's a limerick by Stu:
So, what do you know about horses?
Many colors according to sources.
Buckskins, pintos and grays,
Roans, palominos and bays.
Do they still get along? But of courses.
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