Category Archives: Poetry

POETS DAY! Theodore Roethke

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Tribute, Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils (Latvia), October 2017 by Traqueurdelumieres

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

I’m usually a one check a year guy. J.T. Smallwood has been our tax collector since 2002 so each year I write my property tax check out directly to him, which seems nefarious but is done out in the open in a courthouse with badged officials and efficacious lanyards directing people between various stanchions connected with retractable nylons. There are several signs on the walls and copied sheets clear taped to the counters directing property owners at sufferance to “Make checks payable to J.T. Smallwood.” Credit cards are not accepted.

I wonder what happens when someone wants to write a check to J.T. Smallwood. A neighbor pitching in for a block party, say.

I pay my property tax in December, so I’m past the novelty of the new year and always get the date right. Younger generations will find this hard to believe, but there is no auto-correct for payment dates on checks and the possibly apocryphal rule that a check is good for a full year or six months, depending on who you listen to, was ignored for checks written between Dick Clark and Valentines for human frailty reasons. For all our penicillins, moon launches, and bread slicing, we’re not very good at the small stuff. Habits of the previous ten and a half months carried over. Every check written during that changeover period carried the uncertainty of a Super Bowl winner’s season of victory.

I had cause to write a check yesterday, and I’m proud to say that I wrote 2024 with no hint of hesitation. Was it the novelty of the act? I can’t say. I can say that the new year is off to a paper-saving good start.

Let’s keep the good start going and make use of that paper credit. There are blank notebook pages in desperate need of exercise regimens, weekly diet menu plans, lists of great books you always meant to get around to reading, or names of friends who can tell you if Rosetta Stone is better than Duolingo and which monthly “Soltanto Francais” get togethers serve the best merlot. Resolutions don’t get planned while work is being done so do yourself a favor and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make 2024’s first one a resolute POETS Day.

Try reading a little verse first. The line breaks excite the list maker’s bullet point urge.

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POETS Day! John Skelton, Cyndi Lauper, and Phonies

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Photo by Rene Sears, in the park, with a Pixel

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

I’m sure you’ve heard that there are only nine shopping days left until Christmas. I’m acutely aware, kept up to date by radio, tv, and internet. If I somehow managed to avoid all those electronic reminders, there’s the traffic. There’s no correct lane switching strategy with an army of Amazon vans suffocating every intersection and left averse UPS trucks double parked three to a block. Fed Ex drivers like to park in the median. Maybe they train in Philadelphia.

We let the holidays get hectic. It’s commercial and too often anxiety reigns. “Do I have a present for Dad?” “What do I get my sister?” The buildup was already an ordeal and then advertisers got shifty and started using “gift” as a verb. What gets lost in all of this is what’s important: that there are only three Fridays left to lie, scheme, and dissemble in 2023.

Carpe diebus. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. This is the last one before your penultimate chance of the year. Don’t let the weekend just happen. Be an instigator. Fake a cough, arrange an “emergency call.” Whatever you have to do. Start your weekend on your terms and slip out a few hours before The Man™ deigns to give leave. Have a ball, but try to fit in a few minutes for a little verse. It’s POETS Day. Make the most of it.

***

“I explicated a Donne sonnet and paid uncomprehending lip-service to a beefy dirge by someone called John Skelton.” – The Rachel Papers, by Martin Amis

There is a park across the street from my house. It runs along Shades Creek, a feeder to the Cahaba River and part of the watershed that provides drinking water for the Birmingham area. That’s terrifying considering how much trash we get from upstream.

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POETS Day Turns 100: William Logan

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

This snuck up on me. Apparently, I’ve done 99 of these things for Ordinary Times. This is the big 100.

No foolin’. I counted.

If anybody actually played along and obeyed the “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” acronym every Friday since the beginning, we are talking about significant absenteeism. That’s a lot of man-hours. It’s like stealing. Well done. Keep on going.

Give the boss whatever line he or she needs to hear. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth. Grab the weekend – your weekend – a few hours before the clock strikes bu-bye and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint. Watch a ball game. Flirt awkwardly. Go to the library computer lab, casually clasp your hands behind your back, and walk behind a row of people scanning the internet so you can pretend you’re Captain Kirk monitoring his bridge officers. It’s your time. Do with it as you please, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times: Make time for a little verse.

***

When I started writing these, I felt a little unsure because though I very much enjoyed poetry, I knew little about the nuts and bolts beyond what wisps remained from high school classes and what I picked up from a few later sallies into Graves’ published Oxford lectures. I remembered thinking Graves came off as arrogant. He was arrogant, but in the lectures I found him so in a previously unconsidered way. It was so impressive.

My copy of his lectures is not on the one shelf I absolutely know it should be on because I can picture the spine and no, it’s not in the dining room and I’m sure I remember the red on khaki title by the blue Rupert Brooke so it has to be there. I can’t put my hands on it at the moment so I can’t give you a direct quote, but Graves would read a few lines from [INSERT REVERED POET] and say something along the lines of “Where [REVERED POET REFERED TO CASUALLY BY FIRST NAME] goes wrong is that he…” and then explain how he would have improved upon someone else’s classic.

I remember reading and thinking, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” The answer is that he thinks he’s a poet of substance with as much claim to authority as those whose work he critiques. He’s right. There’s a less impressive but more important answer. He’s a guy who read a poem and has opinions.

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POETS Day! Fugglestone St. Peter’s own, George Herbert

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

POETS Day snuck up on me this week. I try to extend some lifeline, no matter how flimsy it may be, to give plausible rational for skipping out of work early, but I’ve done a lot of these now. Finding a new excuse every week isn’t as easy as it may seem. Don’t let that deter you.

You don’t need me to supply you with a reason. It’s right there: TS. Piss Off Early comes with its own why. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Admire the fulgence of the anagram’s fullness and start the weekend at a time of your choosing.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Catch a ball game at a bar. Take a walk in a park. On average, we only see 4,113.2 Fridays in a lifetime and at minimum 2% of those are 13ths. Don’t waste one clock-watching.

If you do manage to get out, take a moment to read a poem or three. Maybe these.

***

My wife and I honeymooned in Vancouver. It was 2002, three years after the British ceded Hong Kong to Communist China. Refugees scattered all over the Pacific Rim. These weren’t the poor. I read that British Columbia absorbed thirty thousand souls. We were told to expect amazing high-end Chinese cuisine and we found amazing high-end Chinese cuisine.

We went to an elegant place near the harbor for dim sum. It was in a hotel lobby; a huge room below a series of mezzanines with an open wall of glass extending up several floors. Neither of us had ever eaten dim sum before but we were told that instead of a menu there would be a cart full of food that would visit tableside and you chose what you wanted from there.

That’s what happened. A cart came by and there were dumplings and bao, which may or may not be a dumpling as well but seems distinct to me. I think there was soup and definitely spicy vegetables. Little strips of sticky meat. Everything was fantastic. What we didn’t know was there would be a series of carts with different offerings making the rounds.

We loaded up on the first thing that came by and though we loved what we got, we saw what we didn’t. The duck on the third cart looked impossibly crisp. There was a lesson to be learned; a variant on “Don’t make fast friends.” Get the lay of the land before you commit.

I didn’t learn that lesson.

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POETS Day! Thanks for God, Girls, and Growing Old

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

There’s no need for a traditional POETS Day this week. “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” doesn’t really resonate when so many have a long Thanksgiving weekend anyway. Maybe “Pig Out, Enjoy Tryptophan Slumber?”

I’m phoning this one in myself. I’ve got potatoes dauphinoise (Not potatoes Lyonnaise!) to make and since no one else eats or cares about string bean casserole but me, I have to make that too. “Have to,” is misleading. It is necessary that I cook because I told people that I’d be contributing the potatoes, but “have to” makes it sound like a chore. It isn’t. I like spending time in the kitchen.

It’s like this column. I don’t have to write it, but I like doing so. Two years ago, I started this weekly for OT with a smirk, a silly acronym I picked up from a Scottish detective novel, and a nagging suspicion that poetry was not as much an ivory tower property as it’s considered.

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POETS Day! Thumbing Through Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934-1952

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Attribution: Dylan Thomas’s Writing Shed by John M

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

Happy POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work as early as you can and steal a few hours of a weekend that’s never long enough to begin with. Next week’s taken care of because of Pilgrims. Happy Thanksgiving long weekend to come, by the way. This Friday can be a half holiday of your own making should you accept the mission.

Daylight Savings has put the crunch on a lot of POETS Day activities. Indoor stuff makes more sense. You can still skip out of work and go to the park, but it gets dark around 2:15 so watch out for muggers and if you plan to be outside, save some daylight for a little verse. You’ll thank yourself.

***

My biggest problem with Dylan Thomas is that I keep calling him Dylan Harris.

Darren Harris was a guy I went to high school with. That’s where the confusion comes from. I didn’t know him very well; nice guy, we spoke at parties. His name sticks in my head because I heard a story about him a few years ago. He was involved in the student productions at Princeton when Roberta Flack held a concert there. She was so impressed with his management of the operation that she told him to get in touch after graduation. Eventually he became her manager.

I won’t vouch for any of that. He was a few years younger than I was, but I do remember hearing he got into Princeton. I don’t know if he was involved in productions, if he ever worked for Roberta Flack, or if she ever played an Ivy, much less Princeton. But I like the story and hope it’s true. I also hope he had a “Now that’s impossible,” Kramer to Bette Midler moment.

He was a nice guy; funny, too. The problem isn’t that Dylan Thomas brings up bad memories of Darren Harris. Not at all. I just keep saying the wrong name and feel like I should have worried grandchildren exchanging glances they don’t think I can see and wondering if it’s time for the talk.

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POETS Day! William Empson’s “Aubade”

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

I went a little long on the poem this week, so I’m shirking the POETS Day intro. I suppose I could claim that I’m taking a POETS Day myself even though I’m writing on a Thursday so it would technically be a POETF Day. I’m not going to dwell on it.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I trust you all to inspire yourselves, to find a reason to get out of works before the man says it’s time to go. Have a good time and enjoy an early weekend.

***

“And, if I publish a volume of verse with notes longer than the text, as I want to do, will that be a prose work or a verse one? I ask out of curiosity, you understand…”
– William Empson in a letter to his publisher, c. 1930

William Empson was one of the most respected critics of poetry of the 20th Century. He was also a poet, though when reading commentary on his verse there’s often an unspoken, in some cases spoken but in very polite whispers, understanding that we read his poetry because of his criticism. It’s acknowledged that his poetry is technically brilliant but often spoken of as if he were writing to a formula or a unique talent for spotting errors or flourishes in others worked as a constraint when he composed; proper installation at odds with inspiration or something.

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POETS Day! Amy Lowell

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MS Lowell 62 (5), Houghton Library, Harvard University

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

Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in the weekend, Henry Ford’s greatest creation, a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will.

I’ll be getting ready to watch football. A sizable chunk of our family’s Louisiana contingent Pissed Off Early this weekend to come join us in Birmingham for the Alabama/LSU game. Both teams have issues this year so it’s a coin flip as to who’s going to win but we’ve been getting together for this game long enough for me to know that if LSU loses it will be because of a missed holding, pass interference, or face masking call. It always is.

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POETS Day! Henry Vaughan and The Yellow King

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

I started watching True Detective on Max a few weeks ago. I remember reading about the show when it came out in 2014. It was supposed to have all manner of Easter eggs from supernatural horror works. One article made a big deal about references to The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers so I bought that book as a $0.99 Kindle download and promptly forgot about it. I read that Chambers was a big influence on Lovecraft whose complete works I had downloaded for a buck or two some long time before and never read, but I’ve read all the Sandman comics and played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons so at the very least something influenced by the same authors who were influences on the authors of some other stuff I liked was the sort of thing I was interested in being interested in. I promptly forgot about the show.

A Lincoln commercial with Matthew McConaughey aired during College Gameday a few weeks ago and I had an “Oh, Yeah!” moment. It was worth the wait. McConaughey and Harrelson are really good, delivering lines that could have gone off the rails if played wrong. There was one moment where Harrelson’s character watched a gruesome video of a crime and awkwardly has to shout “No!” It didn’t work, didn’t fit the character, and broke what should have been a pivotal moment, but I’m not sure what else he could have done with the line as written. In fact, it highlighted what a hard job the two leads had.

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POETS Day! Fourteeners

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

I was talking about the POETS Day, “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday,” ethos with somebody the other day and she brought up the French and their four-day thirty-five-hour work week as aspirational for the movement. I’m not certain the French four-day work week exists even in the tiny corners of their economy where I suspect it would make its home.

Between headlines about French youth rioting because they won’t get to retire at forty-whatever there are conflicting accounts of what constitutes a job over there. Forbes tells us “France famously has a legally mandated 35-hour work week, enshrined in law since 2000,” but in the Snippets of Paris article “France’s famous Myth: the 35-hour French Work Week” (parsing the capitalization decisions in that headline will keep me up for days) we’re asked “Think the French only work 35 hours a week? Perhaps the French are just not good at keeping track of their hours.”

Whether they do, whether they don’t is unimportant. My well-meaning friend misses the point of POETS Day. It’s not about accumulating time off. It’s about enjoying something illicit.

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