POETS Day! A Bit of Light Verse

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The school year is coming to a close and that means rough duty for POETS Day. The last couple weeks of students’ time is usually cordoned off for exam review and preparation, final essays, and such projects. That creates a bottleneck of extracurricular events now. Playoffs, tournaments, recitals, and plays need completion before testing. Such things require an audience and if you’re a parent or relative of a student in any end of term activity, you’re an expected attendee.

I’m joining the theater set for the foreseeable future. I’ve got a nephew in Legally Blonde tonight and then my son’s on stage for a three night run of Mamma Mia! I love this sort of thing even though they frown on leaving after your kid’s scenes are done (America, explain!), but I know others see these as slogs to suffer through. They’re a drain on weekend free time no matter which way you look at it, so do the right thing and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. A perfect day is the name of the game, and that starts with ducking out of work and indulging your wants and needs – after a little verse.

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POETS Day! Kingsley Amis with a Touch of Philip Larkin

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I’m writing this on a Thursday and I just checked my son out of school early. In the office there’s a sign in/out sheet by an extremely oversized digital clock and I filled in the names. The time was two after two. You couldn’t miss it. I put it down. Above our line were six sign outs all listing two o’clock. There were only eight kids out all day. Six at the same time seems like a lot. Different last names and handwriting.

It’s POETS Day, so do all the regular stuff. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and bars, ballgames, swimming, and parks. Enjoy the weekend a few hours ahead of schedule. All that. But is there something I should know about Thursday? You wouldn’t call it POETF Day, but is there something like that? It’s just a lot of kids leaving at once. Is it a secret?

Read some verse. I’m going to look into this. If anyone wants to clue me in I can keep everything confidential.

***

I was planning on writing about Kingsley Amis without mentioning Philip Larkin. The two met at St. John’s College, Oxford, became roommates and formed a bond still strong when Amis said things at Larkin’s funeral. The little bits of their correspondence that I’ve read cracked me up. They shared a love of jazz, a distrust of posturing, and a wicked sense of humor. Often, when one is mentioned, the other pops up like a mischievous penny.

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POETS Day! Jorge Luis Borges as Translated by Richard Wilbur

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“On the day before the burning of the Pyramid, the men who got down from their high horses scourged me with burning irons, to compel me to reveal the site of a buried treasure. Before my eyes they toppled the idol to the god, yet the god did not abandon me, and I held my silence through their tortures. They tore my flesh, they crushed me, they mutilated me, and then I awoke in this prison, which I will never leave alive.
– Jorge Luis Borges, “The Writing of the God”

That’s a terrible attitude. I should note that he didn’t despair and by the end of the story achieves an enlightenment which renders his physical circumstances moot, but POETS Day esteems escapism. Constricting circumstances shouldn’t be tolerated. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s an afternoon waiting to be played with.

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POETS Day! Moments in The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

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The purpose of POETS Day is to follow the acronym and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work mid Friday afternoon, read a little poetry and enjoy life. Free time is always better when it’s illicitly gotten. Towards that end, in the past I’ve encouraged untruths and subterfuge, recommended apps that show incoming hospital calls on your caller ID, invented religious exemptions, and advised on recruiting co-conspirators.

I recently picked up a copy of The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, billed as “a World War II-era document created by the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to provide guidance to resistance groups on how to disrupt enemy operation through covert means.”

There’s a lot in it about slowing down deliberative processes; recommending committees, enthusiastically suggesting an idea be fully explored into oblivion, and otherwise crippling organizations by inviting bureaucratic involvement. There are instructions for stopping up toilets too. I confess to being less than wowed by most of the entries. I expected it to be more like The Dangerous Book for Boys but with Tatiana Romanova in tow.

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POETS Day! Ovid’s The Amores

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My beach book choices tend towards mystery or comedy. I see a lot of thrillers on condo rental shelves and a few romances. People hide romances though, so I’m sure what I’ve seen is not representative. Elmore Leonard deserves a category of his own unless he wants to share it with Carl Hiaasen. Whatever gets sold in an airport likely fits the beach book bill. That and Ovid.

Romance readers are voracious. My wife’s in publishing so I pick up tidbits here and there I can repeat with an unearned air of authority. Romance is the highest earning genre. 2022: 33% of books sold in mass market paper back have Fabio ripping someone’s bodice featured on the cover. Formats that don’t require readers to tear off or otherwise hide from judging eyes Fabio’s rippled abs and radiant pecs account for 60% of all the genre’s sales. E-books let Romance fans read while hanging out by the pool without a miscued cabana boy thinking the lady needs comforting or raised brows from fellow vacationers or worse (in-laws.)

With no burly-esque cover art, e-readers are free to move about the country. Perception matters. People don’t want to have to explain themselves or be thought of as lesser. A kindle denies any stigma apportioning, but that’s all it does. In the big ledger of literary respect from strangers, staying out of the red is important, but what if you want racy tales that put you in the black?

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Spring Lamb from a Once Noisy Rock

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Silla used to be Scylla. Those were heady days. When the Greeks were in charge this was a mighty place. Sailors knew: “but that is the den of Skylla, where she yaps / abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry, / though she is huge and monstrous.” Six heads of monstrous per Homer, who knew a bit about showmanship, with “triple serried rows of fangs and deep / gullets of black death.” The place had a buzz.

Opposite the rocks that lore named Scylla was Charibdis; a Sicily-adjacent whirlpool, impassible. To risk the whirlpool was to lose your ship. The rocks meant a sacrifice of six crewmen, “from every ship, one man for every gullet.” It was the original hard place.

Further south along the toe’s coast, you find Palmi, with views across the Tyrrhenian of the Aeolian Islands’s Mt. Stromboli to the northish and across the Strait of Messina of Mt. Etna to the southwest. There aren’t many places in the world from where you can see two active volcanoes. Keep going with the sea to your right and olive trees to your left to reach Reggio Calabria, the provincial capital (Overly simplified: Italians say regions when Canadians would say provinces and their provinces are what we’d call counties.)

The most interesting thing about Reggio Calabria to me right now is that it’s listed as the 100th most populous city in Europe by Wikipedia. Not 99th. Not 117th. What are the odds that the city I read about last night and decided to look into further this morning would hold such a decidistinction? In grade school I was told that Mt. Everest was found to be 29,000 feet tall but reported as 29,001 because the statisticians didn’t think anyone would believe the round finding. “Latest measurements” put it at 29,032 feet. Better lasers than in Hillary’s time, I suppose.

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POETS Day! Paul Laurence Dunbar

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It’s rare when a POETS Day featured poet comes complete his own POETS Day call to arms, but such is the case with Paul Laurence Dunbar. “Sympathy,” one of his most popular works, contains the iconic line “I know why the caged bird sings.” Many know the 1899 poem and appreciate it on its merits, but most these days more are likely to know it by association with Maya Angelou’s eponymously titled autobiography. The poem, or at very least the line, is startling in the ready empathy it evokes; now an expression of black oppression and a powerful image for civil rights movements.

In 1897, Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore, soon to be Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, moved to Washington D.C. where Paul had been hired as an attendant, which I assume is sort of clerk, at the Library of Congress. It must have seemed an exciting opportunity for the literary-minded poet. He hated it with a mad (poetic) passion. Alice told him to quit and focus exclusively on writing. I don’t think he was hard to convince. She wrote about what prompted him to write the poem in 1914.

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Meatballs with Sausages: Breaking the Code of Silence

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They must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.  – Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless

This is going to take a minute, so if you’re just here for the recipe feel free to skip on down.

I got my first job at sixteen in an Italian restaurant/pizzeria owned by the people who lived across the street from us. The place was a retirement of sorts. The mister was formerly of the stock market, Alabama bred but with a mid-American accent learned out of professional necessity. Get him laughing and Gadsden came out. The missus was from Brazil. They both spoke English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She added French, German, and a bit of Italian. Their son who helped run the place spoke all of those but German.

They were all clever as can be. (And still are. I see them almost weekly, but this is a nostalgic anecdote and there’s power in “were.” It creates for the reader a sense of being transported, and once frame of reference is changed the experience is more immersive.) There’s an old saying that a gentleman is someone who’s as comfortable in the company of pirates as of kings. As a trader, he spent time with New York financial power players. She was practically Rio aristocracy. They could pull off Ma and Pa shop keeper. No problem.

I remember one afternoon, the missus complimented a woman on her purse. The woman, in her thirties and from the over-the-mountain community (we know because she managed to get that in), was working out whatever insecurities she needed to work out by implying that (a) yes it is a nice purse, (b) you’ll never be able to afford one, and (c) what would a shop keeper know about fashion accessories anyway. The missus gave a Brazilian smile and nodded. “It really is nice, though.”

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POETS Day! The Poetry of Ninth Grade English, Revisited

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I was in a used bookstore downtown, earlier today. It’s a ramshackle place with books and old magazines stacked on warped piles of records and rolled up blueprints and “Mardi Gras 1977” posters leaning against assumed tables; probably enough kitschy crap to deck out a whole reinvigorated warehouse district worth of lesbian coffee houses.  The poetry section shines. Either the owner’s tastes or the resale temperament does a commendable job filtering out new age gibberish and incongruent anthologies plus he shelves criticism with the criticized. I picked up a book of T.S. Eliot essays on Elizabethan drama. Last time I found a collection of poets’ views on Yeats. Five bucks, both.

While I was perusing the poetry a young woman, attractively in her mid-twenties or so, came in and struck up a conversation with the owner. She was in town for business, she said, doing a three-day project that only took two. She didn’t know anybody in town. Could he suggest anything? Sights? A place for lunch?

The only other person in the shop was a young guy, roughly her age, perusing local history and thumbing through old magazines. I knew he heard. The place was too small not to have. I’m old and happily married. The owner, older still. I don’t know local history guy’s story. I don’t know any of attractive work tourist’s story beyond what I’ve shared either, but what I had always considered a laughable cliché – a used bookstore hook up – was not unfolding before me despite the stage being improbably set. Local history didn’t so much as look over his shoulder.

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POETS Day! The Rape of the Lock

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The week’s winding down despite the extra insert day February stuck us with. It’s POETS Day again, time to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Sneak out of the nine to five closer to two. Seize the few hours left in the day and get a head start on evening.

There are all manner of things to do and if you’re of the POETS Day bent you’re probably not a free time naif. You know where happy hours are, what ball games are on, and whether or not the pool is open. All noble pursuits, but have you thought about vegging out in front of the TV (television)? Water cooler shows aren’t really a thing anymore; so many viewing choices make it unlikely that any one program will achieve the reach of Seinfeld or other shows of old.

People still talk about TV at work, though. The shared viewing conversation has been replaced by a recommendation marketplace. “You seen anything good lately?” turns everyone within ear shot into Ewan McGregor from Rogue Trader (YouTube – Free, Amazon Prime – $5.99 rental, $11.99 to buy), barking on the Singapore Stock Exchange floor. They may not wear the garish brokerage house team jackets like those worn by the traders in Singapore – unless they work as traders in Singapore – but they’re just as enthusiastic.

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