Author Archives: Ben

POETS Day! On James Joyce’s Ulysses with a Few Poems Thrown In

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

It’s POETS Day. That may be hard to remember with all the pretender days clamoring for your attention. It’s Garlic Lover’s Day today. That gets my attention. American Libraries Day too. Ecological Debt Day certainly gets my attention. The people I’m picturing “celebrating” that one don’t look like the people who would share public space with the World Smile Day, also today, celebrants.

I play Metatron for a friend’s pizza place on its Twitter account. I started out with “Free 8” 2-topping to the first person that retweets this – offer ends at 2pm, redeemable today at lunch only.” That gets boring quickly so I started throwing out bad jokes (Q: What did the snail say when he hitched a ride on the turtle’s back? A: Wheeeeeeeee!) and non sequiturs. I tried calling attention to pizza themed celebration days. Good Lord was that a mistake. There’s National Pizza Day (Feb 9), National Pepperoni Pizza Day (Sept 20), and a chorus of others vying for attention. I feel bad for National Sausage Pizza Day (Oct 11). It doesn’t get what I assume is the attention its founders envisioned buried as it is in National Pizza Month. PizzaToday.com put out an article titled “10 Can’t Miss Pizza Holidays,” the sinister unspoken being that there are more than 10 Pizza Holidays.

As a society we need to take a stand. Enough with all these non-official acronym-less holidays. I’m not sure how to get rid of all the chaff, but I do know that there’s a full afternoon to clear your mind and think about necessary calendar decluttering if you’re willing to grab it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

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Rigatoni Capricciosi

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

I have Rosetta Stone, so I know a few things.

My new favorite restaurant is a place downtown called Lé Fresca in the just-above-water cool 2nd Avenue North corridor that used to be a choosers paradise of wig and discount furniture shops. Now it’s restaurants and lofts but the Uber shift has convinced business owners that parking is no longer a concern, likely making the one valet stand the most profitable enterprise in the district. Members of the one, true, holy, and apostolic church who are visually recognizable to clergy can park in the church lot but for everyone else finding a spot is an exercise in faith.

One of the few things I know is that “le” is the feminine plural definite article in Italian. The plural ending construct, for lack of a better term, of most feminine nouns, at least those covered by Rosetta Stone through Week 5, Day 3 is to replace the final letter “a” with an “e” unless the final letter is already an “e.” In that case you leave it “e.” So a feminine noun, say “la donna,” becomes plural by changing the “a” in “le” and the “a” in “donna” to “e” so you get “le donne”: the women.

Having been initiated into the mysteries I couldn’t help but notice that “Lé Fresca” seems to have gone rogue. By my reckoning it should have been either “Le Fresce” or “La Fresca.” According to the owner, it’s slang.

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POETS Day! C.S. Lewis

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

Not everybody’s taking a POETS Day this week. Senator Bob Menendez ([REDACTED]-NJ) was charged last Friday with “corruption-related charges for the second time in ten years.” This time’s better. There are gold bars. Cash was stuffed in closeted pockets of “Senator Menendez” embroidered jackets. Nothing this gloriously cinematic/made-for-tv has been reported since Tammy Faye Bakker shot Joey Buttafouco on boat called “Risky Business” when he returned the sunglasses Jon Bennet threw out of a car window into a Virginia roadside field.

Obviously, the Hollywood writers agreed to whatever they had to within forty-eight hours of the Menendez script practically writing itself across the home pages of news organizations the world wide and ended their five-month long strike. They have boxes full of unfinished Marvel sequel drafts and rejected Law & Order screenplays to scour for liftable dialogue, repurpose-able fan fiction sex scenes to de-vampire, and girlfriends’ organic scented candles to product place.

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POETS Day! Laura Riding, Poet/Muse

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

It’s tempting to try and grab a game on one of these last few Fridays left in the baseball season, but my advice is to hold on to that escape excuse. Put it in your back pocket and save it for the playoffs, especially if you’re a Baltimore fan. We don’t get to say “Orioles” and “playoffs” together very often. The birds are usually mathematically eliminated from the post season by the end of April.

This week’s plan to get an early go at the weekend should involve a claim to do something that would make your mother proud and then by saying you’re going to do it and not, make your mother cry.

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Fumigating with Coq au Vin

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

When my friend died I got his copy of Coyote Café, a cookbook by Mark Miller. There was a memorial gathering at a bar on the riverfront in Savannah, Georgia thrown together by few of his ex-girlfriends. Some of his stuff – cds, books, a bike helmet, etc. – was laid out on tables for people to pick up and take home as mementos.

He, my wife, and I were practically roommates for a spell. At the cusp of the century swap, we had the upper left apartment of a fourplex and he had the upper right. We still courtesy knocked, but if my wife was studying and Jeffrey, the friend, was out somewhere I’d still go over to his place if I wanted to watch TV (television) or listen to music. The best part of this communal arrangement was that Jeffery was a chef. We ate well. Very well. And he didn’t just feed us. He taught us all manner of things about food stuffs and ways to make them hot.

I don’t think he taught us anything out of Coyote Café. I picked it because the spine was sun-bleached; it was something that he’d had for a while. The Coyote Café restaurant is in New Mexico and I figured he picked the book up when he was running a kitchen in Arizona. It felt like something that made moves with him. Looking at it now, I don’t think he used it much. He was a sloppy cook at home. He was the opposite when working, but at home things got splashed around and dripped on. The pages are pristine. More than likely, the book didn’t get left.

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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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