Author Archives: Ben

POETS Day! A Few from Hart Crane

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

I have COVID again. This is the third year this has happened. By now I should be like James Matthew Wilson’s ill in “On Being Ill”, “marking down its savor / With such alacrity for shades of difference / That no one else can see or listen to.” This is the first time I’ve had symptoms though, so other than a binary, I have no comparisons between variants.

The thing is, I’m not certain all my symptoms are from COVID. In 2022 I tested positive at least eight times between early July and late September. I tested the first time because someone near me was sick. Once the prescribed avoidance ran its course I tested again as part of a doctor’s office access regimen. Three positive tests within two weeks after that, it became a parlor game. Two doctors had since told me to ignore the tests and declared me interactable. Throughout, I never had so much as a sniffle.

But sniffles still exist. I mean independent sniffles. Sore throats without pedigrees. They exist too. Non-COVID coughs and fevers, achy joints, and headaches from the ether were commonplace before most had heard of Wuhan. This time I tested because I thought our rosemary plant was defective. This was on top of a cough and a sore throat. The loss of smell isn’t complete. It’s like my range is narrowed. I can smell the humdrum, but if something carries a strong odor, say a sprig of rosemary, it’s gone. It’s not faint. It doesn’t exist for me.

POETS Day isn’t as exciting when you’re sick. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday for thee, but not for me. There’s nothing transgressive about following medical guidelines, no matter how capricious. Killjoys told us masturbation was natural, normal, and healthy. The Kinsey Report robbed people of delicious and discrete kinks by turning them into statistical norms overnight. Missing work is still okay, but it’s better when you’re getting away with something.

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POETS Day! Revisiting Clampitt with Cummings In Mind

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Captured in Tommy Thompson Park, Toronto, ON, Canada

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

I live in a quiet neighborhood. It hugs a thoroughfare like a drop of water on a spider’s tendril; a bump bound by a busy road to the north and a creek to the south. People from around town occasionally visit to make use of the parks, but there’s no other destination to be found unless you live here or are visiting a friend. You can’t cut through en route to anywhere. Traffic is limited to us and Amazon and as a result the streets are alive with dog walking, bike riding, couple strolling, and kids playing. It’s nice and peaceful, but the best part is the three naked coeds who frolic by the creek.

They rent a house from local doctor who spent two years playing linebacker for the Steelers. No foolin’. Like most nursing students, they keep odd hours studying and shadowing professionals at the university hospital, but one thing is certain: Friday afternoon is al fresco cavorting time.

It’s such a Spring and Summertime certainty that if you, like me, are out of the accursed habit of wearing a watch, you could set the sock-drawer relegated “mausoleum of all hope and desire” timepiece by the appearance of light sundresses hanging from the branches of the upper bank pecan tree. Must be two o’clock.

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POETS Day! Thomas Hardy

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

Week 0 of the college football season doesn’t count. We know this because it’s called Week 0. Other than provide a chance for Notre Dame to be Oiyrish! in front of the Irish, not much is expected nor delivered. Real Football begins now. As of this writing the Thursday sacrifice of Elon to Wake Forrest remote-button-bounce to Kent State at UCF and all the Big12 giggling that involves is on the horizon. Both are appetizers to what I suspect will be a reportedly more than decent Utah hosting an abysmal Florida (who I still think pulls this out [oops]). I’ll keep UAB on a laptop on the coffee table.

We’ve made it through the desert, our long national nightmare is over, Holy Thursday, morning has broken, etc. Now is the Autumn of our content and no right minded company worth working for would bother making you pretend through the afternoon that you were mentally where you were supposed to be when your thoughts are flitting about Bryant-Denny and the Coliseum.

No need to call it a POETS Day this week. Freedom’s in the air; miasma but a good kind. Still, for form’s sake: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

The season is upon us. Start it of right with a little verse, an appreciative pause, and then a heartfelt “Roll Tide!”

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POETS Day! Allen Ginsberg

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De Amerikaanse dichter Allen Ginsberg in 1979 in de Gentse Poëziewinkel.

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

A friend of mine owns a restaurant and just had to let two waitresses go for absenteeism. They called the health department as petty revenge and inflicted a spot check by a blue gloved inspector. I’m pretty sure it was them.

The word “Tomorrow” matters. POETS Day stands for Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Escape from work on Friday. This should be obvious. Don’t call in ten minutes before work on a Tuesday and have your roommate who works with you call in right after. That’s mean. Someone is going to have to fill in for you. Someone with plans.

The point is to get a head start on the weekend rather than support the lie that anything gets done in the twilight workweek hours; make a statement and stand up for truth and other good stuff. Don’t disrupt the weekend funding mechanism. That’s Bad Practices.

The petty revenge failed. The score post-spot inspection is three points higher than the score pre. On a related note, if you’re in the Birmingham area and want to enjoy a pizza or some pasta in a setting recently confirmed to be clean, I have a suggestion. Sit at the bar and read a bit of verse. Come in on a Friday afternoon and you might catch a fellow patron aglow with the light of a POETS Day properly respected and enjoyed.

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Inspired by Jessica Hornik

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I read Jessica Hornik’s poem “Evening, Lake St. Catherine” in the latest National Review (August 14, 2023). I wish I could reprint it (here it is behind a paywall if you subscribe,) but she’s getting a well-deserved payday and that’s a good thing. It’s a wonderful poem about the highlights of a day folding in towards a moment of reflection or relaxation.

The shape of it is interesting. I’ve been reading about poetic form and function with just enough understanding to make hedged observations. Reading too much into things is a toy I brought with me, but couple that with some gleenings from a well written book, and I’m practically an expert, or the nearest you’re likely to find on the subject in my kitchen at this moment.

The poem is thirteen lines of blank verse set in couplets excepting the last standalone line. The opening line is eight syllables and the next is seven. Then seven then eight, then seven then eight or nine depending on how you pronounce “chocolate.” Nine/seven, five/eight, eight/four, and all alone a ten. There doesn’t seem to be regulation but it follows a mostly iambic music with breaks and me not knowing if a dropped stress is a concession to sense or if she’s shifted to a three syllable foot here and there. Or is it free verse and I’m seeing pieces where there’s a whole? I lack a fluency I wish I had.

I have this issue all the time when reading something that breaks a simple repeated meter. if I see un-st/un-st/un-st/un-st in the first line I say “Iambic tetrameter. If the next line gives me un-st/un-st/un-st/un, what is that? Is that three iambs with an unattached or dropped syllable? Two iambs with an un-st-un foot I looked up so I could call an amphibranch? Is this something poets don’t care about or shrug at?

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POETS Day! Elizabethan Carpentry

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

David Letterman used to talk about windchill factor. A former weatherman, he thought it was goofy that a cold temperature was announced and then amended accounting for windchill making it the equivalent of a colder measurement rather than just saying the final, adjusted temperature. He’d call windchill fake but quickly add “Now humidity. That’s real.”

I’m with him. Humidity alone isn’t that bad. I don’t think I’ve ever complained about it in the winter. It needs heat to angry it up, but once you get those droplets riled the air’s venomous.

My phone reports the day’s temperature with a “Feels like” when it’s humid too, but that’s wrong. Completely wrong. Humidity isn’t an aspect of heat and doesn’t express as an increase of it. Saying “It’s 92° but with 70% humidity it feels like 103°,” assumes a flow towards equilibrium that’s not there. It would be more apt to say “It’s 92° but with 70% humidity it feels like 92° and you just dropped a cast iron skillet on your foot.” Humidity’s a separate and more immediate discomfort. In freeze-dried lasagna lore a frog in a pot of water over high heat doesn’t notice the slowly increasing temperature and keeps swimming about until he boils. Boils, not drowns. No one would believe the cautionary tale if he doesn’t go up for air. When you’re surrounded by water, heat is secondary.

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Tomato Jam (Extended Jam)

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

… in which nothing was pressed.

In 1991, I went to a party in Lexington, VA, a place I was told at the time was the hot spot for inbreeding in the United States. My dad had recently been to Australia, and flying across that countrinent, he read an article in the in-flight magazine about a restaurant in Perth that was hailed as “The Best Restaurant in Australia.” It was near enough to his hotel so he went. “I’ve never been to the best restaurant in a country before,” he told me.

Being in the most inbred, per capita, city in a country is perfectly safe if you observe from a place of safety like an anthropologist in a blind or an oceanographer in a windowed diving bell. I was visiting a friend at Washington & Lee, so it was kind of like that. I don’t remember the party details. We went to a concert in a small columned structure and my friend was a first semester freshman, so I doubt it was Greek sponsored. It was private. I’m sure of that because there were only three or four hundred people in the hall and the headliner was a Robbie Robertson-less The Band. My friend was cute so she could get into any party. No idea why I was allowed in.

I’d never heard of the opening band. They were good, but fifteen minutes into their set I was pretty sure that they were still on their first song. I’d seen jam bands before. I saw The Grateful Dead when it was still jarring to see Bruce Hornsby out of his “and The Range” role. I laid in the grass at Oak Mountain Amphitheater twice while the Allman Brother played “Whipping Post” for two hours with brief side trips to other songs. It was just weird to hear an unknown band assume people liked a song they didn’t know and wanted to hear it riffed, dissected, and reassembled.

I know it was a small venue, but if the band asked me to play with them, I’d take the opportunity to showcase the breadth of what I can do; cast a wide net. These guys played one song – I’m pretty sure – for forty-five minutes. It was unexpected, but great.

I asked about them later. They were some guys from Georgia who were starting to get national attention: Widespread Panic.

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POETS Day! “Against Romanticism” by Kingsley Amis

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

My son started school today, August 8. That’s absurdly early. Back in 2012 Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried to start a conversation about extending the school year by shortening summer vacation. There were arguments about students forgetting lessons between grades and valuable time wasted getting them back up to speed.

The conversation never went anywhere, but it wasn’t meant to. The Department of Education being a bureaucracy, the lack of pushback against an idea most didn’t take seriously meant no impediment to its inertia. So here we are.

I’m dying to say something snarky like “The more time kids are kept away from our public school system the better,” but I’m afraid, especially if I point to political speeches from both sides of the aisle over the course of decades lamenting the sorry state of education in America or mention unacceptable test scores impervious to decades of hand wringing to bolster my point, my friends with a wife/husband/son/daughter who’s a teacher might think I’m blaming a political party or theory of education or even a bloated nameless bureaucracy when really I’m saying that the entire decrepit mess is the fault of their wife/husband/son/daughter whose been trying to score Brownie points with that “I have to buy or sell (or whatever* it is she’s doing) art supplies with my own money,” sob story since We had a President who knew how to throw out an opening pitch.

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POETS Day! Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead

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

It’s a stormy afternoon where I’m writing from. Loud and creeping grey. Not the kind of rain you sing in. There’ll be no park strolling or quarry swimming today. Flashes through the window tempt the unwary with the notion that the workplace is more sanctuary than prison, but that’s a lie. These are the POETS Days that try men’s souls. Freedom is won. It’s an assertion. Step out the door. Face the elements. Start your weekend early. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Be Lieutenant Dan, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse?

***

This is the most audacious landscape. The gangster’s
stance with his gun smoking and out is not so
vicious as this commercial field, its hill of glass.
– Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead: Alloy”

In 1930, Rinehart and Dennis contracted to build a tunnel through Gauley Mountain near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia for New Kanawha Power Company, a subsidiary of the Union Carbide and Carbon Company, to divert the New River towards a hydroelectric plant.

Of the five thousand men employed to work on the project, some twenty-nine hundred toiled underground in ten to fifteen hour shifts. The project, completion estimated at four years from ground break, was finished in eighteen months. The mountain was composed of remarkably pure silica, so in compliance with safety regulations only wet drilling, a process that cut down on breathable silica in the air, was strictly adhered to when inspectors were on site. The rest of the time they dry drilled.

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POETS Day! John O’Brien

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

I took several POETS Days off from the regular world recently, but rather than declaring “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” to reclaim a deserved – and I could go on, but those hours are ours by right – Friday afternoon, I tagged along with friends and family for a couple of weeks of nature. That meant going to Wyoming to hear the kids make “Teton” jokes, Montana to eat elk burgers and stay in a hotel within driving range of Yellowstone and snobby Bison that walk right up your car, cogitate, and pass without so much as a nod of acknowledgement, and then on to the second-most-fantastic state in the U.S. for white water rafting down the Salmon River, from which we returned despite the nickname. Again. It was all glorious. I got to wear SPF river pants that were almost identical to the parachute pants I wore in 1984, zippered pockets and all.

Idaho. I meant Idaho when I wrote “second-most…”

Hemingway killed himself in Blaine County, Idaho, where Ezra Pound was born. I’m not throwing that in to satisfy my POETS Day Ezra Pound mention quota, though it does do that. For whatever reason, that patch of land was an alpha or an omega to two remarkable literary careers. They were sparring partners and Pound considered Hemingway, who once said that he learned through Pound more “about how to write and how not to write than anywhere else,” one of his most intimate friends. Hemingway later helped secure Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital.

Pound’s connection to Blaine County is of his parent’s doing. He doesn’t mention his origins much directly in his writings – I should say, “In his writings that I’ve thus far read.” – except to present himself as a Philadelphian of the world. He does adopt a yokel written affectation in some of his letters: Robert Frost is “VURRY Amur’k’n,” and of Ulysses, in a letter to Joyce, he writes “An’ I reckon’ this here work o’ yourn is some concarn’d letershure.” The affectation is almost always used in association with something he admires or at least approves of. Pound was an awful snob so maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the yokel affectation grasps the heart of the matter. Was there a wistful bit of rural Idaho in him that came up in conversation between the two? It would make sense in response when (not if) Hemingway spoke of his Michigan woods. I have no evidence, but I assume Hemingway found Blaine via Pound and if I ever find some tale or exchange detailing the hows and wherefores, you’ll hear about it. It’ll be a POETS Day seven-parter.

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