Wednesday, November 14, 2018

"THE PLIGHT OF OLIVES" (ooh, it's National Pickle Day)

It's National Pickle Day according to Twitter.

There's always a "DAY" on Twitter.

Like, wasting time at work day, networking stupidly day, and how about getting a life day.

ANYWAY...I thought I'd written a poem about pickles in "Let Peas Be With You," but I didn't. I wrote one about cucumbers.

I did write about olives, usually "pickled" in a martini. "Back in the day...." there weren't many salad bars, "organic" was not a term most people knew, and nobody ate olives "straight." It was an afterthought after downing a drink.

Thus...from a hot summer day in the Hamptons, another one from the Boy Poet himself...

I wish I could take credit for the artwork.

Every week a new poem appeared in the I.G.A. supermarket ad. From an early age I learned to write on deadline. The best advice writers generally hand down to students is simple enough: "WRITE." Just keep writing. You'll improve, you'll surprise yourself, and you'll train your imagination to let go. One of the poems I knocked out one day, thinking about different food, was "The Fly and the Sugar Cube," which wasn't exactly suitable for an ad (who thinks of buying sugar cubes so a fly can walk on 'em?). I think it ended up being sold to some other newspaper or magazine, and I later turned it into a song. As Norman Mailer used to say, it IS "the spooky art." So often not just poets, but...ROCK SINGERS...admit, "I don't know where it came from, it just wrote itself." That's part of the joy of creation.

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