Author Archives: Ben

POETS Day! Emily Brontë

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I have an uncle who is never bored. He’s always up to or up for something. One of the collateral benefits of restlessness is that he banks interesting places and activities he discovers wandering around. There’s rarely a “What do you want to do?” because he’s got a backlog of interesting half-explored outings nipping at his synapses.

He found a used book store in Fredrick, Maryland he says has more than its share of signed books. I bought signed copies of William F. Buckley’s The Unmaking of a Mayor and Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits (“Happy Birthday Frieda! Here’s a Useless Book!”) My uncle’s pretty sure there’s a bored or impish clerk with a sharpie, but I choose to believe otherwise.

Another time we went to NRA headquarters, but only partially to shoot. The night before, he told me about the strict protocols and double gun safe lock check ID frisk metal detector side eye you get when going in because they know more than any mass attrocity, an incident at the NRA home base would be the PR nightmare. We sat in the parking deck after we were done, guns locked and trunked, and riffed that despite all the guns in proximity, this place is a mugger’s dream of unarmed targets wandering around in the dark.

He’s always coming up with stupid, giggly fun like that.

Happy POETS Day! Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s something off or silly in your town waiting to be found. Take a few hours away from work and make fun. Go do that.

First, verse.

***

I was of the assumption that all women read Emily Brontë as girls. The soon-to-be menfolk would retire to the parlour mad they aren’t yet old enough for brandy and cigars and read Treasure Island, Mark Twain, and Ivanhoe while the women retired to have pillow fights and to read Jane Austen and a Brontë or three wherever they went when the men were in the parlour. I never had cause to question.

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POETS Day! Robert Bly

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

The last time I had a flat tire, I took a picture. It’s still in my phone ready to be deployed should I be disastrously running late for something I can’t be understandable tardy for.

Years ago my wife got a call from work on a morning we’d forgotten to set the alarm. She darted awake and off the cuff railed about an Alabama Power truck blocking our drive. She’d be there as soon as possible, she said, and I heard sympathetic sounds from the other end. I’m not that quick. I need a plan. You should have a plan too.

It’s a close up shot showing only the tire and the road without any seasonal flourishes like golden leaves, sleet, or sandaled feet. Next time you get a flat, take a picture. Heck, if you see a stranded motorist, pull over and take one. Everybody has a phone and will have called a friend or relative so you’re in little danger of getting roped into actually helping. For POETS Day, an excuse to be late doesn’t help much. You want out for the day and a flat tire just means you won’t be back in from lunch or whatever for a few more minutes. Also, sending a picture unprompted is suspicious. It’s better attributed to another.

Pull up the picture when the time is right and tell your boss a daughter/neice/grandmother just sent it and needs help. They’re a ways out, but sitting safe in a diner or something. You can just make it out but by the time you get back… “I’ll make it up Monday. You’re great for understanding,” and out. Matinee, ball game, bar? Up to you. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, a little verse.

***

I hadn’t thought of Robert Bly since college. I took an honors English seminar led by a New Aging professor focused on his manhood reclamation manifesto, Iron John: A Book about Men. I can’t remember the professor’s name, she taught non-fiction creative writing and I suppose the thinking went that as a renowned poet, Bly would serve up examples of poetic sensibilities pressed into argumentative prose service.

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POETS Day! Katherine Mansfield

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Section from Anne Estelle Rice’s Portrait of Katherine Mansfield

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

Is it birthday season where you live?

Lord, we have a passle of them going on right now. August is supposed to be the most popular month for U.S. births, but the bleed into September is more Romanov than slight. We’ve had four in the last two weeks with three on deck and that’s just in town immediate family that, though Catholic, doesn’t have a single nuclear branch that wouldn’t fit in an modest Protestant preferred sedan.

Statistics say your family clustered as much as ours, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work early and enjoy the afternoon/kick off the weekend early. It’s probably your birthday. Treat yourself. If it’s not yours, take a moment to wrap a present and sharpen a suddenly dulling cake knife. Maybe try to figure out why grade school kids shout “Eat more chicken” followed by an ever changing litany after the birthday song. (How do they know each week’s new variation? Those who aren’t parents of small children will have no idea what I’m talking about but kids add to the birthday song – my nephews from Albuquerque in sync with the kids here in Birmingham because they somehow know even though it changes from week to week, water park pavilion to pizzeria long table. They’re like druids receiving unwritten arcana.)

First, a little verse.

***

I thought about doing this week’s POETS Day about one of the Bloomsbury Group because I have a knee jerk dislike of them and I was feeling snarky. They were mean cool-kid gatekeepers. Nepotism involves relatives. Cronyism describes promoting friends. For the Bloomsbury clique I need a new word; one for promoting the person you’re having an affair with to make your spouse take notice and prove how cosmopolitan he or she is by sleeping with that person too, before, as a couple, dropping the promotee and pretending neither ever had anything to do with that middle class climber. I feel like the word should also convey mocking laughter in the direction of Roy Campbell. Nasty little hive of lit-rury hornets.

Wikipedia has a decent list of Bloomsbury members, satellites, and associates. You have to do a little digging to find out who was discarded for getting too clingy, but it’s a handy reference. What caught me was the few listed after the sentence “writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not ‘Bloomsbury’.” T.S. Eliot was mentioned. Good man. As was the Campbell wife seducing Vita Sackville-West. Good story. I’d never heard of Katherine Mansfield, but she was listed among people of interest with the good sense to be distinctly not “Bloomsbury,” even if Vita was at the very least more than Bloomsbury-adjacent until she became a middle class climber. That’s despite Vita’s being a brilliant gardener and real-deal inbred baroness.

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POETS Day! Yeats and Graves and the Moon

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

Years ago, I was writing a POETS Day about the Australian poet Judith Wright. I’ve written here that I’m a fan of Poetry Foundation’s website because they do a great job putting together mini-bios of poets with links to their works, etc. There wasn’t one for Wright even though they mention in the mini-bios of others that this poet or that was winner of the prestigious Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award.

I sent an email to whoever the intern is that has to answer @info type email and surprisingly got a response. “Thank you for pointing out the oversight…”, “We need to rectify…”, etc. Most importantly, they asked me if I had any suggestions about which of her poems to feature along with her bio page.

There’s still no bio page, but that’s unimportant. Poetry Foundation is an outgrowth of the legendary Poetry magazine founded by Harriet Monroe. She had a bigger hand in shaping Modern Poetry than most; maybe than anyone. She consulted giants like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. And now, through other means, her publication was consulting me. This led to my frequently making irrefutably truthful statements like, “Poetry magazine, which has sought editorial advice from people like Eliot, Pound, and me…”

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POETS Day! From Henley to Plath

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I go on for a bit below so I’ll keep this part short.

College football starts this Week! Whatever files need filing or rivets need riveting, leave them be. They’ll sit til Monday. It’s POETS Day! Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

There’s Auburn to route against Friday night and hated Tennessee against a Syracuse team I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with opinions on playing Saturday morning, both looking across the line as if in a mirror and thinking “They look like idiots in those orange uniforms.”

Then there are proper teams playing.

– Alabama @ Florida State – Saturday 2:30 CT on ABC

– LSU @ Clemson – Saturday 6:30 CT on ABC

– Tons of other less compelling but long awaited games bracketed between Boise State @ South Florida at 4:30 CT on Thursday on ESPN and Utah @ UCLA at 10:00 CT on Saturday.

If you’re reading this on Friday and were unaware, you’ve missed the Thursday slate but there’s plenty left to see if you have gumption. Get pissing off early. There are games need watching.

We made it through the desert. First, a little verse.

***

This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald is my favorite of the genre, but there’s also Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce or Pere Goriot by Balzac if you’re in a Contenental mood. There are plenty, a whole grip, to borrow an elastic phrase a chef friend is fond of, of semi-autobiographical first novels written by young writers with more desire than experience, so they run their hero though naivete-shedding travails and leave him wiser and poised to conquer. It’s been forever since I’ve read any of them so they’ve all gotten mushed together in my mind but at least one of them ends with the author stand-in character in a cemetery shouting a version of “Look out world. Here I come!” That’s the synecdochic scene for me.

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POETS Day: LSU and Robert Penn Warren

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Photo and fiddlin’ with it by Rene Sears

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

I’ve spent a lot of this last month’s non-rainy days in my backyard making noise. The constant noise comes from a small but surprisingly loud bluetooth speaker that subjects my neighbors to (lately) Elvis Costello, Blondie, Joe Jackson, and whatever the Amazon Music algorithm associates with albums by those three. Blondie does a particularly good cover of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” so the when that comes on the neighbors get to hear it repeat at least a second time. The intermittent noise comes from my new table saw.

We redid the living room and dining room, by which I mean we turned the living room into a office for my wife and I with a big TV to watch muted baseball games on all day, turned the dining room into a living room, and realized that we always eat at the kitchen table and don’t need a dining room. To decorate the living room formerly known as the dining room, we pulled old prints and paintings out of the closet and took them to a framer.

The largest was a Willem De Kooning print from a 1994 National Gallery exhibit. I’m fond of the print. I went to that exhibit to keep a friend company and came out interested in art. It’s odd shaped; 39 ½” x 30 ½”. We picked out a green distressed painted frame with gold trim and learned there were types of glass. The woman told us it would cost $325 to do the job. That’s a very fair price, it turns out, but if you haven’t had anything framed in over a decade and come in with no frame (sorry) of reference as to price, it’s a bad number. I had five other pieces I needed framed.

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POETS Day! Percy Wyndham Lewis

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’ve been in Italy, so I missed a few POETS Day Fridays, or “Fridays” as the Italians call them, but with an accent (everybody over there except one Salerno cab driver speaks English, and I have my suspicions about him.)

Anyway, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Cut out of work while the sun’s still out and enjoy a heat-staving scoop or two of gelato at any one of whatever block’s you happen to be on many gelaterias. Gather a few friends and put your heads together to figure out why you’re encouraged to touch this Coliseum wall but get snipped at by security if you touch that identical one. Hold up a lemon bigger than your head. Swim in ridiculously blue seas while staying determinedly out of any body called a canal. Very refreshing.

First, a little verse.

***

Augustus John’s portraits tell stories. Frightful stories on occasion. I read somewhere some time ago, so forgive the lack of attribution, that he could be so insightful – and equally capable of conveying his insights – as to be “cruel.” His Roy Campbell adorns the cover of Peter Alexander’s biography of the poet. Campbell, pre-paunch and balding, looks impressionable in his Spanish countryman get-up. John’s painting sets the stage for Alexander’s telling of a man of immense talents swayed by passions he mostly grasped. It’s a great book, but I judge the cover better.

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POETS Day! Philip Pain and MJ

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

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

We’d swarm around my old neighborhood on BMXes with one or two banana seat hand-me-downs trying to keep up. There were a thousand kids kicked outside until dark every summer morning along four suburban parallel streets we considered our patch. Tractors came in 82 or 83 and clear cut a huge swath of wooded land; seven or eight football fields worth to build an office park. It was glorious.

We’d sit on the hill watching all afternoon and then descend when they broke for the day around three or four. Daylight Savings left us four- or five-hours sunlight to slop through upturned roots, climb hulking yellow diggers frozen like Bilbo’s trolls, and color blue jeans rusty with Alabama clay. I got my foot stuck in that clay one time and it took two other guys to pull me loose. Somewhere under the Embassy Suites with obligatory Ruth’s Chris that stands there now is a ten-year-old boy sized red Converse All-Star, the right one I think. Couldn’t get it out.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make it a POETS Day, go outside and play while there’s still four or five hours of daylight left.

First, some verse.

***

I know very little about Yvor Winters, but from what I’ve read he liked to think himself immune to or outside the influence of popular opinion. He’s tagged as eccentric and a proponent of clarity and precision in form. Over his thirty-plus years as a professor of English at Stanford, he had to contend with giants. You can’t ignore the greats, but he seemed to get a kick out of championing lesser-known poets.

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POETS Day! The Honorable Archibald MacLeish

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

There is a sound my car makes. It’s used but I just bought it, so it’s “new to me.” I’ve had two mechanics look to try to find the cause. The sound only happens in very specific circumstances. There’s a clank, like the spare tire is sliding around when I brake quickly. Maybe it’s like the sound a metal gas can makes when you push in the side and release. The first thing I did was remove the tire and jack, get in, accelerate, and brake short. The sound was still there.

My wife and I disagree about the origin. I think it’s over the right wheel. She thinks middle rear. The first mechanic didn’t hear it at all until I drove her around. The second claimed he didn’t hear it at all. He’s insane. Both pros are clear: the car is sound, right as rain, hunky dory (honky doory, because it’s a car.) I’m allowing the Carvana send-back date to pass and keeping it.

In any case, I know how to make the sound and have learned how not to make it. Regular stopping was never an issue. Any stop that’s abrupt enough for the driver to say, “Sorry about that,” to passengers and cu-clank. But I learned to ease off the brakes at the very end. That doesn’t quite describe it. Anyway, I’ve adapted and the noise that maybe only my wife and I can hear is no longer an issue.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s a beautiful day for a drive and the roads are more fun pre-rush hour than during. It’s safe out there again. I’m not randomly braking to see if the maybe-phantom sound is still there anymore. Much.

Just in case: If you see a silver Nissan, don’t tailgate for the next couple of weeks. First, some verse.

***

Archibald MacLeish wanted to put on a musical retelling of “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and take Broadway by storm. The play would be a torch passing. Bob Dylan would write the score. MacLeish won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1933, again in 1953, and another Pulitzer for his free verse drama, a retelling of the book of Job, J.B. Dylan was the counterculture balladeer sensation. Producers had to be happy.

It was a disaster. The established poet and hip-with-kids next generation songwriter didn’t work well together.

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POETS Day! Walter James Turner, “Australia’s Georgian Poet”

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

This is too easy. There’s a new Pope, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Tell your boss you’re going to mass to pray for the newly anointed Vicar of Christ. Odds are good that you’re not going to mass, so that’s a lie and lying’s a sin. Most churches offer Confession on Saturdays. Just don’t go stepping in front of buses or licking electrical sockets for twenty-four hours and you’ll be fine. (Pro tip: Save time at Confession by cutting in line. Minimal exposure.)

If your boss is Catholic, you’ll be out in seconds flat. If not, you’ll still be out in seconds flat because non-Catholics have no idea when obligations fall. If you aren’t Catholic, pretend you are by Googling and learning a few Latin phrases to say around the office: “May I borrow your stilus?” “Sorry I’m late, hora concursus traffic.” Etc. They’ll get it.

Happy POETS Day and enjoy your work-free afternoon. First, a little verse.

***

I put “Australia’s Georgian Poet” in quotation marks in the title because I found them on a website providing a quote from Dominic Sheridan, Professor and/or lecturer at the University of Gdansk in Poland who researches Australian War poets of World War I in particular. “Australia’s Georgian Poet” is itself in quotation marks in the Sheridan quote, so he got it from somewhere too. Whether it was a sobriquet that followed Walter James Turner, one invented by Sheridan, or something quoted from yet an earlier source, I have no idea, but I like it. This is my roundabout way of letting you know I’ve found an interesting new (to me) website called Forgotten Poets of the First World War. There are some five hundred posts going back to 2014 and sourcing at least as far as from wherever they’re based as Gdansk. Worth a look for the curious. Looks useful.

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