I ran into Pete Smigelski the other day and he looked better than he has in years! When I asked how his writing was going, Pete pulled out the photo on the left.
Pete: My writing's going really, really great! I'm in the zone, man! I'm on autopilot! Jesus Christ, it used to be that if I wrote one poem a week I felt good. Now I'm writing a poem every couple of hours! It's amazing!
Mitch: Wow, Pete. What do you think has made the difference?
Pete: It's very simple. I never had a muse! I never had an inspiration! I was writing poems but I didn't know who the fuck I was writing them for. Then just by chance I happened to google Robert Graves and started reading about his concept of the White Goddess. That's when it hit me. I needed a fucking muse!
Mitch: So what did you do?
Pete: Well, I figured that if I found out about Robert Graves on the internet, maybe I could get a muse there too. So I did a little editing of my profile on match.com and in the Onion personals. I mentioned that I was looking for a muse — and I must have gotten a dozen responses in the first week. I met up with Jennifer, and the rest is literary history!
Mitch: That's Jennifer in the photo?
Pete: That's her! That's my muse! Listen Mitch, if you're trying to write poetry without a muse you're an asshole. Not just you, but anybody who's trying to write without a muse. The poetry writing public has got to be made aware of this. You remember how Pound used to eat his heart out about what America would be like if the classics had a wide circulation? Well, that's how I feel about poets and muses. If people would glom onto this the whole poetry scene would be fucking transformed overnight!
Mitch: Hm. Let me give this some thought, Pete. You might be on to something.
Pete: You bet I am!
(to be continued)