POETS Day! Wallace Stevens

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


It’s a belabored point, but one that needs occasional repeating: TGIF is the eunuch of end-of-workweek acronyms. Thank God It’s Friday? I respect the devotional aspect, but His touted support for self-helpers makes this seem a bit passive. Now, POETS. That’s a call to action, clarion to the rugged individualists, crisp and energizing as a winter’s morning. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday! TGIF is the ice cream social your parents organize for you and your school chums. POETS Day is the kegger you detonate when Mom and Dad are out of town. Leave TGIF for office coordinator emails with stock art balloon borders and posters of that long-dead kitten. Put aside childish things. You know the drill. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the need to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park with a special someone, go for a swim, catch a matinee, or for the masochists, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mightiest of all acronyms may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

When most people think of a poet, what one looks like as they go about their business, they probably think of someone Byronic leaning over a battered wooden table, scribbling mid inhale on a loose sheet of paper, fingers inkpot stained, a girdle-tight vest over whatever style puffy shirt the modern mind thinks was always in vogue before mass produced mirrors, a vee of dark curls fopping over the upstage eye like a bunch of wine grapes, the interior of the tent improbably well lit by a single candle, and the air still redolent of gun smoke from day’s battle for Greek independence. Poets may not be of the Romantic school, but we think they should look like they are.

At a favorite holiday spot in Key West, he got into a voluble argument with Robert Frost on at least two different occasions, and once he slugged the man he considered the anti-poetic devil. Per Stevens biographer Paul Mariani, “So it began, with Stevens swinging at the bespectacled [Ernest] Hemingway, who seemed to weave like a shark, and Papa hitting him one-two and Stevens going down ‘spectacularly,’ as Hemingway would remember it, into a puddle of fresh rainwater.” He did manage to land at least one blow, apparently breaking his hand on Hemingway’s jaw.

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Pork Chops alla Milanese

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

“Outside Italy, these are known as ‘Viennese chops’ (Wiener schnitzel). It is difficult to know who gave the recipe to whom; Lombardy was in fact under Austrian domination for a long period.”
– The Complete Italy: The Beautiful Cookbook, Patrizia Passigli, Fred Plotkin – Harper Collins

The Italians have cotoletta alla Milanese and the Austrians have Wiener schnitzel. Both are simple dishes of pounded veal, breaded and lightly fried. Both claim that their dish came first and was borrowed by the other.

As evidence of Lombardi origin, the Italians cite a letter written to Emperor Franz Joseph by his aide-de-camp Count Attems extolling a Milanese veal preparation and suggesting the Emperor introduce the recipe at court. The Austrians rightly counter that the letter in which Count Attems mentions the Italian version doesn’t exist and that there was never an aide-de-camp from the Attems family attendant to Franz Joseph. They show that the dish existed in Austria as early as the publication of a popular German language cookbook in 1831. Point: Austria.

I get the feeling that the Count Attems letter was a feint by the Italians to force a misstep by the German speakers because once they fixed 1831 as a near enough date of the Austrian version’s first appearance, the giggling Italians slapped down a copy of Pietro Verri’s History of Milan, published in 1783, which recounts from available records a menu from a feast given at the Basilica Sant’Ambrogio in 1134 featuring lombolos cum panitio which is an obvious ancestor of cotoletta alla Milanese. Point: Italy.

They should probably get a bonus point for going medieval.

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POETS Day! Delmore Schwartz

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Delmore Schwartz

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

This is one of those weekends where POETS Day gets lost in the wash. The first week of March Madness is a triumph of unproductivity. It’s not that the NCAA Tournament is so compelling that even non-basketball fans get into the excitement. It’s that basketball fans get so excited by it that they think it perfectly natural that people who don’t otherwise like the game would suddenly get swept up by the spectacle and those who don’t care realize that by pretending to care as much as basketball fans think they should they get to half ass it at work, take long lunches, use the copy machine to print endless personal documents, call their friends whenever they feel the urge, watch T.V. (television) on their phones at their desk, openly gamble, and leave early to catch the late afternoon game just like everyone else. Their bracket, chosen solely on the basis of which mascot is cuter, is just as likely as the fans’ to win a couple of hundred bucks too. So go do whatever. I don’t even think you have to ask to leave early. Go take a nap, hike a bit, marvel at how uncrowded places without walls of televisions are. Just be ready to talk about a blown call or an amazing comeback in one of the games you were supposedly watching. People will put the important-for-conversation clips on Twitter. As always, don’t let the weekend go by without a little verse. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday… even if everybody pissed off before Thursday’s tip off. If the basketball thing doesn’t spring you, there’s always St. Patrick’s Day to fall back on. Erin Roll Tide!

***

When Delmore Schwartz was twenty-five years old, he made a huge splash in New York intellectual circles with the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The book, a collection of short stories and poems, was well spoken of by two of the time’s giants in Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He was fresh and talented and people predicted a great deal from him, which he delivered for a while. When he died, it was three days before anyone identified the body. Friends said they hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Alcohol, drug addiction, and insanity wore him down.

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The Haller Pizza

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

In 2005 I was working at a recently opened small fine dining restaurant just outside of Birmingham. At the time all the big restaurants, and in Birmingham at that time when you say all the big restaurants you meant Frank Stitt’s Highland’s Bar and Grill, eventual James Beard Most Outstanding Restaurant award winner in 2018, the newer places owned by former Highland’s employees clever enough to attract investors hoping to recreate chef Stitt’s success, and a handful of non-Stitt affiliated places venturous enough to open sans pedigree and good enough to make their own name, were located on the south side of the city, creatively known as Southside, with a few starting to bleed into downtown.

Most of the area’s money lived in the suburbs to the south; mainly in Mountain Brook and Vestavia but Greystone and other areas of Shelby County were pretty flush too. My employers’ plan was to get themselves a former Highlands sous chef and build a restaurant right in between all that suburban money and the great restaurants in Southside and save people some driving time while making a buck in the process. That’s just what they did.

We were open for lunch the first few months. Dinner was the primary focus but there were a few corporate headquarters located nearby so the thought was that clients would be entertained and working lunches would be hosted. What we got was cookie cutter perfect reproductions of a table of two elderly women sharing a single chicken salad sandwich and loitering until well into the time when dinner prep should have begun throughout. It was a good thought, but lunch didn’t work at that spot.

It wasn’t all in vain, though. We gleaned a little bit of wisdom re the habits of our clientele and, more importantly, I added a new pizza topping combination to my list of favorites.

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POETS Day! Paul Lawrence Dunbar

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Howard Univ., Washington, D.C., ca. 1900 – class picture.
Paul Laurence Dunbar is in the upper right.

[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 8/5/22 which was a Friday. You can look it up.]

I’ve spent a great deal of energy not checking Facebook. I’d go in once a month or so and see whose birthday I missed or who’s moving on to a different job. I’m kind of a hermit so I would otherwise miss out on such things. Two or three years ago, I ran into a friend in the grocery store and asked about her family and her husband and I managed to inquire a few weeks after their divorce was finalized. That was an embarrassing in depth conversation in the produce section and well documented on Facebook had I been watching. I recently missed something else that was happening, something important. Now I’m checking in to the site every other day.

What I’ve seen has got me thinking about all the myriad life changes I see reported on the site. How can Facebook be weaponized to plausibly give credence to the great goal of Fridays: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday?

There are all manner of minor emergencies reported on that site. People stuck with flat tires, a tree falls in the yard, a kid falls out of a tree so you get a smiling picture with a new cast. You can get creative and find a clever way to bend such posts to your purpose assuming there is one that pops up on a Friday afternoon, but the posts are tagged with a real person’s name and for all you know the boss is a friend or acquaintance or a committed bondage submissive of the person you claim to leave early to help. That can get messy. Make a fake account.

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POETS Day! Marianne Moore

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

If you lived in France, you’d already be home by… actually you’d still be at work. Turns out that thirty-five hour work week we hear about is just something the French pretend to enjoy the way they pretend everybody in their family tree that’s old enough to be dead was part of La Resistance, stood up to Robespierre, or was Charlemagne (that last one’s true though.) They had me there. I thought those Gallic geniuses really had the four-day work week worked out, that they were the P.O.E.T.S. Day legends of song come alive. Their failure and subsequent fakery should not deter you. P.O.E.T.S. Day, like the war against the Axis, doesn’t require France to succeed. It’s still your time that’s being squandered in the waning hours of the workweek as organizational inertia forces you and your co-workers to go through the motions of production. Nobody’s getting anything done after lunchtime on Friday. It’s clock watching, text messaging, and paper shuffling until the whistle blows. Don’t be part of the farce. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Tell your boss whatever you have to. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, whatever. Your presence at your place of employment on a Friday afternoon is in service of the lie that you aren’t already mentally at the bar or the ballpark, wandering through a pleasant park, or dropping by a special someone’s for a bit of reverence. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over delicate pieties and so were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

“It should be revised, Mr. Goodwin; wish it were better — I value your forbearance; — am encouraged that with all its faults you care to own it.”

Marianne Moore wrote that to Johnathan Goodwin on the front flyleaf of a first edition copy of her collection Poems, released in 1921. It sold for $3,824 at Christie’s in 2002. The inscription is dated July 7, 1962. I like that. It shows that she knows how to hold a grudge. The book was published behind her back without her permission by her former Bryn Mawr classmate, the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle,) and her partner, the English novelist, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman of the ship owning Ellermans if you must know, but we don’t put on airs around here.) Moore is said to have disapproved of the selection and layout but was not displeased by the cover.

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Pizza Dough: The Descent of Man

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

In the mid-nineties I had the opportunity to tour St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It sounds silly to say given the setting, but on viewing Michelangelo’s Pieta I had a near religious experience. There was no Coleridge mentally prompting me as he did his tourist at the waterfall, because no prompting was needed. It is sublime. Every curve and fold amazes. Mary’s sorrow hidden near one and a half thousand years in marble until one man set his gifts to reveal it is terrible to behold. I’ve never been stabbed so I can’t say for certain that the metaphor fits, but my reaction to the work was immediate, deep, and unexpected. Tears welled and ran down my cheek. It was not pretty.

The Pieta is a reminder of what man is capable of. It’s humbling and inspiring at the same time. We all have some creative bent we indulge. He may not be Michelangelo, but the hobbyist guitar player who’ll never quite get bar chords right is following that same urge towards the divine. As a race we strive towards a perfection we can never achieve, but the likes of Beethoven, Austin, and Yeats leave behind spectacular failures to remind us how close we can get.

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P.O.E.T.S. Day! Hart Crane

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

Just when you thought it would never end, classical mechanics saves the day. We’ve spun through another week and that blessed moment when the whistle blows, it’s time to punch out, and traffic swells is almost upon us. Why wait? It’s P.O.E.T.S. Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s no reason to stick around when even the boss has mentally gone fishing. You’re not going to get anything done. At least not done well. Get out of there. Dissemble, obfuscate, ignore the niceties that lubricate the engine of society. There are mid-major basketball games to watch. Head on down to the bar a few hours before you’re “allowed” and have a happy hour beer. No one’s going to notice. Head to the park or the zoo. Browse a book store with a sleeved cup of that overpriced coffee they sell there. I wouldn’t go fishing because the boss might decide to slip out early too and that could get awkward, but hey, it’s your time. Take it. Do with it as you will. That said, may I suggest in homage to the mighty acronym, setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the niceties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

This week’s poet is Hart Crane and his poetry can be a bit hard to grasp. That’s not just me being obtuse. Harrison Smith from the publishing house Harcourt, Brace wrote “I feel certain you are a genuine poet-and there are not many genuine poets lying around these days. . . . It really is the most perplexing kind of poetry. One reads it with a growing irritation, not at you but at himself, for the denseness of one’s own intellect.” The critic Edmund Wilson wrote he had “a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was … not … applied to any subject at all.”

It was though. His style was applied to a great many things as he aptly explained to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine in the 1920s, in a letter responding to her concerns about his submission, this week’s featured poem, “At Melville’s Tomb.” Previously Marianne Moore wrote to him, when rejecting an earlier poem for publication in Dial, “its multiform content accounts, I suppose, for what seems to us a lack of simplicity and cumulative force.” T.S. Eliot passed on the same poem for The Criterion. I imagine Crane jumped at the opportunity Monroe offered to explain his poetic choices, or his “rationale of metaphor,” to the editor of one of the more influential periodicals.

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POETS Day! Ursula K. Le Guin

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Photo by Marian Wood Kolisch, Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

Happy POETS Day everybody. Another week is almost in the rearview and here comes a weekend peaking its devious head full o’possibilities over the horizon. What will you do this go round? Go for a sail? Hit the beach? Skydive? Watch an Impractical Jokers marathon?

You’re probably going to watch an Impractical Jokers marathon.

Weekends used to be more fun. Remember when you were a kid and the bell rang. You couldn’t get home, strip off your precious school clothes, throw on some Swiss cheese jeans, and hit the road on a bicycle or skateboard soon enough. You had the neighborhood gang to meet and do scampish things with. Now you watch the clock and tap stuff with your fingers when the boss isn’t looking. Stop it. You’re not a kid anymore. You’re a grown up with agency and the legal right to buy fireworks assuming you don’t live in Massachusetts or certain counties in Nevada, Wyoming, and Hawaii. Quit waiting for the prescribed departure time and do something proscribed. Carpe volutpat vestibulum. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment just get out of there as soon as plausible. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

I had no idea Ursula K. Le Guin wrote poetry. I knew all about the fantasy and science fiction books and all the Hugos and Nebulas but her verse was totally unknown to me. I was in the poetry section at my local library trying to find the ill-advised The Dolphin by Robert Lowell where he included bits of private letters from his ex-wife in the poems and I saw Le Guin’s name on a spine. At first, I thought somebody made a mistake and one of her novels was mis-shelved but before I pulled it to give to the librarian I saw the 811 Dewey number. Sure. Why not. Lowell can wait.

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Spaghetti al Lent with Tomatoes and Smoked Trout

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

I had a theory about Lenten fasting that was described by someone whose opinion I value as “the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard.” He added something along the lines of “Where do you get this nonsense?” but I thought there was something to it so I’m going to share with you here.

I saw a map of the olive oil-butter line; the dividing line between areas of Europe that primarily use olive oil and those that primarily use butter as cooking fat. Now the EU has super-fast trains and Ferraris to carry goods from one region to another, but that wasn’t always the case. Until recently, you shopped locally without needing to be told to do so by a t-shirt. If you lived below the line you cooked with olive oil. Above, with butter. I remember looking at that map years ago during Lent and realizing the countries to the north of the line were mostly protestant.

The Catholic Church used to have a much larger appetite for fasting. By some accounts nearly half the days of the year were designated as preparation for feast days or days of remembrance or were part of a holy season. All of those were subject to dietary restrictions. If you’re an Italian Catholic in 1516 enjoying a nice dish of turbot sauteed with zucchini in olive oil and one of your dining companions reminds you that the next day, as the first Wednesday after the Feast of Santa Lucia and thus an Ember Day, was a fasting day, you might check the stores to be sure you had more turbot, zucchini, and olive oil to cook them in for tomorrow because the rules likely made no difference to you. The Mediterranean diet was such that you had to be sure and only inject lamb, pork, or beef into your regimen three times a week, which is likely two or three times more often that you were used.

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