For National Poetry Month, I am writing poems inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Diary, Volume 3 1925-1930.
For someone who longed for the pleasures of solitude, Virginia Woolf spent an awful lot of time in company. Her diary of spring and early summer 1925 details an apparently endless round of visits, dinners, and engagements, and it is clear that standards for conversation were very high. Nothing was lost on Woolf–no intellectual weakness, no contradiction, no flaw. She engaged in an evening of gossipy conversation with friends, and then came home and captured the people and the talk–not always kindly–in the pages of her diary.
Day #4: Gossip
she nets butterflies,
spreads the wings of their secrets,
preserves their foibles.
her friends are her specimens,
characters mounted, displayed.
the dirigible plum 
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