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

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

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I read a lot of poetry that I like but don’t write about. There are a few that I like, want to write about, and set aside because I don’t have a fit for them yet; I imagine there are companion pieces and if I have patience and keep an eye out, I’ll find a tie-in for the set-aside, write about whatever thread links the works, and end up giddy for the convergence. That happened once, but mostly I have a bunch of tagged poems consigned to fester in the Rainbow app and torn-notepaper-bookmarked anthologies languishing on my shelves. Half the time I can’t remember which work called for the bookmark. Two sonnets on the even page, a villanelle on the odd; one of them caught my eye but the mood is gone, the association lost.

Today I’m sharing a few of the bookmarked poems I’ve been holding onto for a while. Fans of Jeopardy are familiar with the clue category “Potpourri,” filled with clues from a variety of categories that were left on the board, not called by players when time ran out. I thought of the stupid pun “Poet-pourri,” but before I made claim by saying it, I explained to my wife that I was writing about unrelated poems this week and asked if she could do a potpourri illustration. She jumped my stupid pun reveal with a blurted “You should call it “Poet-pourri.” Now I can’t prove authorship. At best, one of us plays Newton to the other’s Leibniz but I’m fine sharing the shame.

If you read last week’s POETS Day about the Cavalier poet Sir John Suckling, you might remember this stanza from his poem “The Constant Lover” where the poet puts on a smirk to congratulate himself for being true to the same woman for three whole days, forecasting that he may not stray for another few if his mood and the stars don’t kick-start a mercurial influence.

Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.

Richard Lovelace came in to the Court of Charles I right around the time Suckling got run off by Parliamentary warrants and in absentia verdicts of treason, but the there was a period where the two might have known one another. Suckling was a crummy gambler, a cheat, and a hell of a cricket player per John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. The same source calls Lovelace “a most beautifull gentleman,” “One of the handsomst men of England,” “an extraordinary handsome man,” all three in a meager 194 word biographical sketch. “…but prowd” is affixed to the third. The Cavaliers were the cool kids: jocks and wits and full of themselves.

It doesn’t surprise that Lovelace writes in sentiment with with Suckling. The former’s “Have I not loved thee much and long, / A tedious twelve hours’ space?” runs along and plays happily with “The Constant Lover.” Lovelace’s wrinkle presents his inconstancy as a boon for both himself and the lady and hints at the joys in other embraces they’d be denying themselves, not to mention the pleasures of their company they’d be denying others, and won’t we be happier should we come back to each other having sated our curiosity? “I have to sleep with her for us, baby.”

Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, PJ O’Rourke and the early National Lampoon guys put on a Cavalier attitude and it was hilarious. I doubt that attitude was as funny when those adopting it had swords and the King’s favor, but that circumstance is more than 300 years distant, so it’s funny again. “Eric Stratton, Pledge Chairman, damn glad to meet you,” and “Could you get three dates for my friends?”

I haven’t read enough of Lovelace’s work to give him his own POETS Day. I haven’t found enough of his work to judge, if I’m being honest. Still, this one’s memorable.

The Scrutiny
Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)

Why should you swear I am forsworn,
Since thine I vowed to be?
Lady, it is already morn,
And ‘twas last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility.

Have I not loved thee much and long,
A tedious twelve hours’ space?
I must all other beauties wrong,
And rob thee of a new embrace,
Could I still dote upon the face.

Not but all joy in the brown hair
By others may be found;
But I must search the black and fair,
Like skillful mineralists that sound
For treasure in unplowed-up ground.

Then, if when I have loved my round,
Thou prov’st the pleasant she,
With spoils of meaner beauties crowned
I laden will return to thee,
Ev’n sated with variety.

JK Stephen is a poet I very much want to feature, but haven’t managed to find more than a mention of his work save the poem below. He apparently wrote two volumes of poetry mocking other poets and the state of literature in 19^th century England. Toss onto that that he was tutor to Edward VII’s son, cousin to Virginia Woolf, and was, depending on who you ask, either thrown from a horse into a moving windmill vane or hit by something tossed from a moving train, suffering a madness inducing head injury from whichever, and you can imagine I’m champing at the bit for more. Save the absence of access to his poetry, he’s damn near perfect subject matter-wise.

Among the bits of evidence pointing to his mania, Wikipedia tells us he plunged the “blade from a sword stick into bread.” I’ve done that. Also, he was “deluded that he was a painter of great genius.” Art is subjective. He drove “about dangerously in a hansom cab.” As if no one sped in the pre-FLOCK days. And, “he appeared at breakfast and announced, as though it were an amusing incident, that the doctors had told him that he would either die or go completely mad.” But he did go mad and die, so who’s zooming whom?

In any case, he’s spot on funny in the poem below.

A Sonnet
JK Stephen (1859-1892)

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmers with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times—good Lord! I’d rather be
Quite unacquainted with the ABC
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

Emily Dickinson was notoriously reclusive. That’s the thought that should be first and foremost in the readers mind when reading her poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” I messed up and let an intrusive thought supplant that and ruined the poem for myself.

Ezra Pound and, I believe, TS Eliot had a back and forth on the effects of art on art that came before. Pound contended that once the artistic tradition, as it marches along, casts an older work in a new light, the new interpretation supplants the old. I think Eliot stood up for the work and its author’s intent, whether or not that conflicted with other things he’d said or written. Well, score one for Pound. I read this, and I can’t explain why, envisioning the speaker as Audrey Hepburn in her black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and speaking with the voice of Fabienne, Bruce Willis’s character’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction. And new art cast a stupid shadow over old.

I wish I could explain why I imagined that persona and that voice, but I did, and I ruined the poem. Possibly for you too. Shame, but there it is.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Dont tell! they’d banish us — you know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell your name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!

As long as I’m mentioning Eliot, he had a wiry little eye-brightening smile he’d deploy at times. I like that Eliot; up to something. Too many photographs show the banker; pinstriped dour. It’s fun when he turns his smile on you. Edward Lear wrote silly nonsense poetry for children and later for adults. Eliot copies his style with the self effacing ditty below. I thought the title was plucked from the air—silly sounding for silly purposes—but Eliot had a dog named Cuscus and a cat named Mizra Murad Ali Beg after the writer Godolphin Mitford’s pen name. I’m learning not to assume Eliot does anything flippantly… even in the flippant poem below.

Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg
TS Eliot (1888-1965)

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With a bobtail cur
In a coat of fur
And a porpentine cat
And a wopsical hat:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth be open or shut).

Anthony Brode wrote a poem called “Flying Chaucer” for the March, 1956 issue of he Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I haven’t found that poem, but I can assure you, based on the title, that it is excellent. Brode’s hard to find much on. He wrote comic poems, one of which made its way into the Kinglsey Amis edited Oxford Book of Light Verse. Otherwise, there are titles mentioned, but no full texts I can find (granted, only in a quick look about.) I can’t even find a date of death, assuming he’s not still with us at one hundred and three.

One morning he read copy on a box of breakfast cereal, picked up on a beat close enough to the great Gerard Manley Hopkins’s distinct sprung rhythm, and ran with it. If he is still around, I’d like to shake his withered hand.

Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins
Anthony Brode (1923-??)

‘Delicious heart-of-the-corn, fresh-from-the oven
flakes are sparkled and spangled with sugar for a
can’t-be-resisted flavour.’—Legend on a packet of
breakfast cereal

Serious over my cereals I broke one breakfast my fast
With something-to-read-searching retinas retained by print on a packet;
Sprung rhythm sprang, and I found (the mind fact-mining at last)
An influence Father-Hopkins-fathered on the copy-writing racket.

Parenthesis-proud, bracket-bold, happiest with hyphens,
The writers stagger intoxicated by terms, adjective-unsteadied—
Describing in graceless phrases fizzling like soda siphons
All things, crisp, crunchy, malted, tangy, sugared, and shredded.

Far too, yes, too early we are urged to be purged, to savour
Salt, malt and phosphates in English twisted and torn,
As, sparkled and spangled with sugar for a can’t-be-resisted flavour,
Come fresh-from-the-oven flakes direct from the heart of the corn.