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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POETS Day: A Boy’s Life

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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.

***

Boys play seriously. Words used metaphorically by noncommisioned adults, words like “scout” and “reconnoiter,” carry a punch in their youthful declarations implying duty or professionalism.

For a brief stretch of years, they patrol the neighborhood with pant legs tucked in galoshes on the lookout for good sticks, skipable rocks, animal tracks, and fossils. If they’re lucky enough to live near slate deposits or any shale that cleaves, “arrow heads” abound.

My wife and I walk roughly the same path everyday, weather permitting, along our creek. The city is making improvements no one wants. They cut ten foot paths through grass and laid asphalt pathways intermittently. Then they stopped. Debris containing construction fences have been in place for ten months now. The wiffle golf players don’t come out any more, nor do the Russian card players, though one of their chairs litters a fenced off section near the put in. The old foot worn paths remain. Neighbors ignore the city’s trails and keep on as habit and sense dictates, but the city paths wind. They snake in such a way that all the clearings that hosted croquet and touch football are intruded upon.

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POETS Day! John Millington Synge

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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.

***

John Millington Synge is gross. Not really. At least not as far as I know. I was reading The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and got caught without a bookmark. J.M. Synge starts on page 144, so that was my little mnemonic: “John Millington Synge is gross.”

Synge was a great Irish playwright who wrote poetry, but very little of it. At least, he published very little of it. As best I can tell his sole collection is Poems and Translations. It contains twenty-two original poems, all short and mostly light and amusing. In addition are translations of poems by Petrarch and Villon, but they’re prose translations of the original author’s verse. I don’t find those terribly interesting.

The twenty-two seem more from a man who wanted to play with an amusing thought that channel a muse. Yeats was fastidious after perfection. Heaney feared frogs. Gogarty swashbuckled. Irish poets have great origin stories. Synge was wickedly clever and insightful, but I don’t get the sense he envisioned himself as a poetic force. That’s not to say he didn’t think big thoughts on the subject. There was a conservator about him.

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POETS Day! Dickinson and Hopkins as a Control Group

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

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

First, a little verse.

***

I’m re-reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram.” If you aren’t familiar, he discusses the impact of television on his generation of fiction writers, as well as those subsequent. He makes the case that we’ve been roped into an irony trap – too post-modern for our own good – and served a side of warped empathy to boot.

The idea that we’re shaped by consumed drama has nagged at me. Frankly, I feel bludgeoned by it. The saddest scene I’ve seen on video is one lost to channel surfing. It was one of those true crime investigative documentary series. I can’t find or recall the name of the show where I saw the original, but plenty of similar scenes exist. A young woman’s mother was murdered. She’s giving her victim’s impact statement before a judge as part of the pre-sentencing procedure. This should be unprecedented in someone’s life. There should be no proper way of doing things. There should be no blueprint. But she has one.

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POETS Day! Carl Sandburg

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

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

First, a little verse.

***

Carl Sandburg was posthumously honored with a postage stamp bearing a sketch of the poet done by his friend William A. Smith and the poet’s “distinctive autograph.” The “distinctive autograph” language comes from Wikipedia which appears to have gotten it from the world stamp authority, Scott Catalogue. Who doesn’t have a distinctive autograph? Signatures are supposed to be distinctive.

Before this week, I didn’t know much about Sandburg beyond a handful of poems I really liked and a handful I really didn’t. I knew he was a major figure in American letters, but didn’t realize the scope. In short, I was aware of his poetry and impact on that discipline, vaguely aware that he’d written Lincoln biographies, and think I’d heard somewhere that he helped preserve and widen the audience for American folk music. I didn’t realize how beloved he was in his time. Rather, I didn’t realize how large a figure he was in his time, because for all that he was beloved, he was scorned too.

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POETS Day! A Look at Narcissus

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

It’s POETS Day! Friday afternoons aren’t meant to be spent working. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out and grab a beer, catch a game, or stroll through the park. You’ve done your part. Enjoy the rewards.

First, a little verse.

***

Narcissus gets a bad rap.

There is a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You can read all the traits common to sufferers and a series of deficits and exuberances therapists are on the lookout for in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5th Edition. The problem is there’s no Latin. All the warning signs are kitchen table words so though it may well be true that “grandiosity” has a very specific meaning to mental health professionals, it has a more elastic meaning to the rest of us and we have an obnoxious aunt who won’t abide competing cobbler recipes, a co-worker who parks his precious convertible across two spots because he’s worried about dings, and a neighbor who thinks I like his grass clippings piled on my side of the line. By my reading of the DSM-5, they’re all a bunch of damn narcissists.

He died enthralled by his own reflection, starved because he couldn’t break gaze even to eat. Narcissus is the prime choice as patron of the self-obsessed, but there’s a hitch.

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