POETS Day! Hugh MacDiarmid Thistled While He Worked

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I just got an email from my son’s college informing parents that our little darlings have to be out of the dorms by May, 9. That went quickly. Tempis fugit, carpe diem, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Honestly, that really snuck up on me. Freshman year: Almost down.

In the mean time, do that last one. Happy POETS Day.

First, a little verse.

***

I read about poets lives a good deal, and have decided that a lot of literary immortality is born from not having any idea what you’re doing on any front—politics, relationships, plain ole human decency—and making a ton of noise while you try to figure it out.

Not all, but many. Mild mannered insurance agent Wallace Stevens threw a punch at Hemingway. Pound blathered on about passports, clothing drives, new, new, new, and economic fantasy. The upright TS Eliot kept well within the rails when not tearing hundreds year old poetic tradition to pieces and filling the void with continuum-compliant fixes. He may have been the messiest of the lot. It’s seamless energy. Even in tubercular throes, Keats, Dunbar, Praed, and Lawrence produced poetry, sent out letters, remained exhibitionist observers. From one thing to another, promiscuous passions, stardom, hermitage; there is either a singularity of focus in the moment frequent to literary success or a conspiracy of biographers leading me to believe so. And the energy needs focus. One thing succeeds, fails, or finishes. What’s next?

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POETS Day! Apes in Hell

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

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

The work week’s nearly done and you’re spending these last few hours doing what exactly? Trying to look busy? Surreptitiously scanning restaurant reviews? Checking game times? Texting your friends about restaurants and game times? Cut it out and cut out. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I’ve mentioned before that I’m an introduction reader if the introduction is relatively short or obscenely long. My theory is that I might as well read a short one and that a long one indicates something in the book requiring the long introduction; something I might otherwise miss. My experience shows mid-length ones to be fumbling, fawning, and filled with ten dollar praise of the sort grad students fuss out over beloved former teachers. If I like the book, I’ll read those after. It’s a slapdash theory, but it’s served me and I’m fixed in my habits.

Christian Lorentzen wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classic edition of Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis, and I’m a little ticked off at him. He’s funny and drops some whispered-about biographical info, though he’s writing about Amis and the info is about infidelity so it was loud whispering to begin with, but entertaining. I’m not going to work out the chronology, but Harper’s claims Lorentzen as a contributor, as do the London Review of Books and others. This intro is a small sample size, but I’m content to dub him one of the good guys and read what I come upon in the future. Still, he ticked me off. I’m pretty sure he gave away the ending of the book.

Not so terribly that I won’t read. I’m pretty, not totally, sure he spoiled it. Lorentzen gives a who’s who of the characters, outlines the conflict central to the plot, and then tells us the ending is “genuinely shocking.” But given the build up as explained there’s only one genuinely shocking ending. If he’s pulled a feint and one of the mains out of nowhere joins the priesthood, reveals himself as the Lindbergh baby, grows a trunk: fine. The ending isn’t spoiled. But given where the story, by his touching on it tells, is going… Dammit.

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POETS DAY! Keats Gets Snippy About Wordsworth

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

In the summer of 1818, John Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown went on a walking tour of Scotland. It looks like the pair covered somewhere between six hundred to six hundred and fifty miles over forty-four days, so about fifteen miles a day, give or take and accounting for weather.

Keats wrote a series of letters about the journey to his consumptive brother Thomas, unable to travel with what they didn’t know at the time was his last bout with tuberculosis. He brings his brother along in these letters. It’s endearing. He’s colloquial and considerate. Reading, you get the sense he really did “Wish you were here.” You also get the sense that he was entertaining a bedridden friend, and further, the sense that his audience enjoyed laughing at small frustrations.

There’s a great deal about lovely views, divine salt water baths, and all the joys that make for good travel brouchuring, but Keats peppers it with amusing observations; little asides he would give were Thomas along.

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POETS Day! George William Russell, Co-Host of the Irish Literary Revival

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Illustration by Rene Sears inspired by the Paintings of AE

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

For those who care about golf, this is your time. The Masters and its NPR whisper-excitement for four televised days is a duck out of work away. For those who don’t care about golf, it’s going to be a pain in the ass getting a table at the neighborhood joint. My local sods the dining room and patio, props azaleas in all the corners, pulls in an under-armor collared shirt Hootie type band for post-round, and makes it damn near impossible for a regular to eat a club sandwich in peace. People in green and white holding red solo cups spill out into the parking lot. They pack the place and good for them, I guess.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I hope your golf team wins.

First: verse.

***

In his younger years, George William Russell had a vision. Details of the vision are unclear to me, but “Aeon”, a Gnostic word meaning early being or ancient cosmic intelligence, popped from the fringe of understanding and held court, nipping at his synapses. He claims to have never heard the word before and to have been ignorant of its meaning until revelation fixed it front and conscious center. Obviously, he looked it up. Obviously it had meaning and implications. He decided Aeon would be his non de plume.

Something got confused. A printer was buffaloed by Russell’s use of the ash, or “Æ” character, to spell Æon. There doesn’t appear to be an academic reason for the ash. I can’t find support for using the symbol in aeon though there was a fashion for dressing up Latin and Greek terms with it as flourish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries whether called for or not. There were heavy metal album cover designers before there were heavy metal albums, so it’s possible Russell spelled for an esoteric aesthetic.

For whatever reason, he used it and the printer didn’t pick up on what he laid down. To the printer’s defense, Russell’s handwriting was notably atrocious. He’s lucky to have deciphered the hieroglyph as resembling A and E at all. The result was a work credited to an author named AE. Russell liked AE and kept it.

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POETS Day! St John of the Cross as Translated by Roy Campbell

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Sketch by St John of the Cross with color treatment by Rene Sears

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

Happy Easter and Ziessen Pesach, if I have that right. All to all.

There may not be work to get out of, but here’s some pseudo-POETS Day mystic verse.

***

When Juan Yepes, ordained John Matthias and later changed to John of the Cross, died in 1591, crowds thronged his viewing, tearing away pieces of the beloved spiritual leader’s burial clothes as mementos. There was impressive competition for his remains.

He was originally buried in Ubeda where he died. Two years later, he was relocated on the sly. The monks at Segovia felt that since he’d been prior of their monastery, they had claim to his remains. They left a leg behind for the Ubeda folks and donated an arm to be venerated in Madrid, but the bulk was whisked away by the Segovian interests. An appeal to Pope Clement VIII in 1596 put the Ubedans back in the game. The pope ordered John’s remains sent back. There was rumbling and arguing. In the end, the Ubedans added the other leg and the arm that wasn’t in Madrid while the Segovians held onto his head and torso.

I resisted saying St John had been the “prior prior” above, so I feel I’m entitled to make an “everybody wanted a piece of him” crack here: Everybody wanted a piece of him. People were different then.

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POETS Day! CS Lewis and Roy Campbell Agree to Disagree

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

Major League Baseball season is upon us. The Sweet Sixteen is under way. You need not to be at work. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, some verse.

***

Roy Campbell says that in February of 1936 he was forced at gunpoint to vote, using a dead Spaniard’s identity, for the Popular Front. This would have been months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Peter Alexander writes, in a footnote in his Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography that he was “unable to verify this story.” It’s important to note that he notes this because Campbell was an outrageous story teller whose facts regarding his own exploits need checking. But the truth is, Campbell led an outrageous life filled with noble, clownish, ill-considered, shrewd, Quixotic, and valiant, depending on the situation, deeds.

He’s hard to believe. Campbell bragged he was a spy for Great Britain during World War II. That wasn’t the lie. The lie was that he was good at it. His espionage involved getting drunk in Spain, cosying up to fellow bar patrons, and saying “Don’t tell anybody, but I’m a spy for England. Have you heard anything about what the Germans are up to?” (Not kidding.) You get enough of his exaggerations and then hear a surefire whopper where he claims to have played matador “bullfighting” a rhino in the wild, and it turns out he’s telling the truth. He survived, but the beast charged through his makeshift cape and made a mess out of his brother-in-law’s Range Rover. Such is the complicated task of making sense of the life of Campbell.

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POETS Day! Ford Madox Ford’s “In the Little Old Market-Place”

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Rene is out of town so there’s no illustration from her this week. The above is what happens when I’m left to my own devices.

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

In the Little Old Market-Place
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939)

(To the Memory of A. V.)

It rains, it rains,
From gutters and drains
And gargoyles and gables:
It drips from the tables
That tell us the tolls upon grains,
Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls
Set into the rain-soaked wall
Of the old Town Hall.

This is a longer poem, ninety-two lines, than I usually feature here, so I’m breaking it up with commentary as I see fit. I hope you’ll excuse my not prefacing each excerpt with “from In the Little…” An added apology: I have no idea who A.V. was. I did look around.

This work first appeared in his collection High Germany, dated 1911 but apparently not published until 1912, and reappeared in the debut anthology of Imagiste poets, back when the movement was helmed by Ezra Pound, Des Imagistes. Pound was awed by Ford and eager to get the established critic, novelist, editor, and poet on board. In part, Pound was thankful. Ford gave several notable poets a beginning in England, among them Pound, DH Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. When put on the pages of Ford’s English Review, they were elevated, sharing space with Yeats and Ford’s dear friend Conrad. It’s said here and about that he “discovered” these new voices, but that’s a messy term. I’m sure what it means in the pertinent sense, as all had published but not to scale, is that Ford lifted them up and made them salon worthy subjects.

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POETS Day! D.H. Lawrence

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I wish I’d never written T.S. Eliot or C.S. Lewis or even E.E. or e.e. cummings because I’ve established a period pattern where now I think TS, CS, and EE/ee is more elegant. The Chicago manual makes a distinction between initials used in combination with a full name – F.D. Roosevelt – and initials used in the desert – FDR. Yes, and then no, to periods. I’m with the British on Dr and Mr, though in practice I’m in the habit of Dr. and Mr. As a rule of thumb, a shortened Professor becomes a Prof. with a period because the final letter of the contraction is not the final letter of the word. Dr ends with the R, so D…r makes more sense than Dr. Auto-correct puts me off periods even in the case of Prof. because I had to go back and uncapitalize the B in “because” as anything aside from Mr. Mrs. and Dr. gets embiggened as a matter of resolute coding. In most cases, British punctuation makes better sense to me. To paraphrase T?S? Eliot, grammar did not precurse language. We spoke, later wrote, and then imposed inflections, pauses, and groupings. The marks are servant to the writer, so mixing and matching a little American, a little British, and a little intuition isn’t all that bad. It has the added business of flustering hobgoblins.

There is a school that insists D.H. be D. H., but that’s absurd. I’m not sure how the article above will end up. As of this writing, all that exists of it beyond this intro—which I normally write last but I’m so bothered—is “POETS Day! D.H. Lawrence” and I’m incensed that there are periods abbreviating David and Herbert but not Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday even though I know there are different rules governing acronyms and initials. I have a history of T.S. Eliot, but very much want to recant and adopt TS Eliot going forward. I’m struggling internally with a man v man and man v society conflicts.

In any case, It’s Friday. The work week is done but for make work pretending as you look forward to the weekend, so why bother with the show. Get out and go play. Duck out mid afternoon and start the weekend off on your terms. Piss. Off. Early., Tomorrow’s. Saturday.

But first, some verse.

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POETS DAY! James Dickey

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

Officially, the work week’s nearly done; barely a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and then. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

My favorite librarian passed away. I didn’t seen him the last few times I was in, but I never divined his comings and goings well enough to know his days off. Poor health caught up to him. I don’t know what to say other than I’ll miss chatting with him. A few falls ago, I mentioned a Muriel Spark book I picked up. He recommended a few of hers he liked. They were the odd ones people didn’t talk about that often. His co-workers put up a memorial photo of him over a shelf filled with his recommendations. There’s a stack of printed sheets listing his “LOST Classics of the 20th Century,” for the interested, in the spirit of his Sparks recommendations: lesser-known books picked from respected but not bankable authors, for the most part. It’s an idiosyncratic list. That fits. Godspeed.

Last September, he and I were talking about the poets to come out of Vanderbilt University in the years surrounding World War II. He mentioned James Dickey. I knew Dickey was Poet Laureate back when they still called the office holder Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, but I didn’t know much more beyond. We had to read Deliverance in 9th grade and as 9th graders, we watched the movie in addition and made 9th grade “Squeeeel like a pig!” jokes, but ignorance beyond that.

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POETS Day! Lies, Damn Lies

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

Officially, the work week’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and then. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

“Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that, about men, poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man’s own loss and another’s gain—these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.”
– Socrates, from Plato’s Republic, Book III

I hope you’re feeling indulgent at the moment. This week I’m playing around.

As a kid I read a snitty back and forth between writers. George Will called R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. – I’m paraphrasing – “the kind of writer who thinks archaic words are funny.” I had just read Tyrell’s introduction to Orthodoxy, an American Spectator anthology not to be confused with Chesterton’s book of the same name. Will was spot on. Tyrell’s description of his magazine’s founding brimmed with Latinisms. I learned that I was the type of reader who thinks archaic words are funny.

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