Category Archives: Poetry

POETS Day! Hartley Coleridge

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He looks okay to me. Tiny hands, maybe.

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

My kids are out of school again today. This is becoming a regular thing. There have been holidays, teacher workdays, snow days, bad weather forecast days, and one power outage. It’s gotten out of hand. They’re off Monday too.

Part of this can be put down to the extended school year. Back in my day, school ended on Memorial Day and didn’t pick up again until Labor Day. Elementary school kids knew a freedom more expansive than their concept of time passage. Middle schoolers re-invented themselves, returning in the fall with a deeper voice and a few Led Zeppelin t-shirts. High school kids got jobs, went to science camp, or rehab. There was time to know an unshared existence.

The Germans may have lost the war, but they also lost the next war. After beating them twice, the rest of the Western world carried on their loser Prussian school system as if nothing had happened. Fredrick gave the Generallandschulreglement, and we still march on. Der Realschule is never satisfied. It wants year-round classes.

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POETS Day! More Seamus Heaney and Thoughts on Touching Stuff

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Seamus Heaney

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

Last week’s POETS Day was about Seamus Heaney, and I seemed to have found myself in a moment, albeit a miniscule one. Douglas Murray featured Heaney in his regular Sunday column, “Things Worth Remembering,” over at The Free Press and then the latest issue of The New Criterion arrived with a review by Paul Dean of both The Letter’s of Seamus Heaney and The Translations of Seamus Heaney. I got swept up in it all and the books I borrowed aren’t due back until the day before Valentine’s, so l’m going to keep it going.

I’m pulled by the urge to say “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s…” and then substitute something about the Super Bowl for the usual “Saturday,” but I’d have to include “Bowl.” It’s not POETSB Day. I can’t write “Super bowl” to de-emphasize half of what is a well-known proper title, and even if I did, it looks stupid. I’ll keep it “Saturday” and assume you know the drill. I’ll stay away from Taylor Swift cracks too.

***

My wife and I, weather permitting, try to walk every day along the creek that runs near our house. Today I was telling her about Heaney, what I’d read that afternoon. He left a sizable collection of literary papers and works to Emory University. They have his along with collections from other Irish poets: Yeats, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, and others. That’s about a two-hour drive from Birmingham and I was thinking maybe we’d take a day trip. And then I thought, “Why?”

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POETS Day! Listening to Seamus Heaney

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

As always, it’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but this week you may not have piss off quite as early. I’m not suggesting you stay at work. Don’t do that. Get the weekend started early as per usual, but today we have an audio component. If you have a cushy desk job and a pair of earbuds, you can take time for a little verse right there in the discomfort of your cubicle.

Some may say, “Listening to non-work-related material on company time is like stealing!”

Yes, it is. Delicious stealing.

***

Harold Bloom wrote about everybody. As editor of the Modern Critical Views series, he got his name on a mess of book spines. They’re essay collections, and a hell of a resource – each focused on a particular author or movement and each with an erudite introduction by Bloom himself. A quick count on Goodreads shows one hundred and seventy-nine volumes dedicated to individual authors. There’s not a decent cover amongst them.

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POETS Day! Vita Sackville-West

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

Veda Sealbinder Bonds and Vita Sackville-West were not alike. One was an award-winning poet who had lady sex with Virginia Woolf and the other was a put-upon innocent who made do speaking with only her tongue and lips as her jaw was clenched rictus fast when she said things like “Yew liddle brayats!”

They inhabit the same rhythmic space despite Veda bringing an extra syllable along for the ride. The -er in Sealbinder is nearly dropped and the -ville in Sackville is drawn out so they’re exchangeable timing wise. I wish I could say that Sealbinder is a dactyl substitution but I always over think feet. Veda Sealbinder Bonds could be trochees followed by an iamb? It’s enough to say that if you were writing a song about Vita and suddenly roved an eye toward Veda, an eraser’s all you’d need. Three stresses and the song remains the same. I think of one and the other comes along mnemonically.

Two friends in seventh grade scoured the phone book for strange names, and poor Veda’s made them laugh. For a decent chunk of 1984 or 85 she was subject to increasingly elaborate though decreasingly coherent prank calls with a giggling chorus of their fellows listening in on other phones throughout the house. Her name was so funny to us.

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POETS Day! My Problems with Walt Whitman

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

I live in a city that is not prepared for cold weather. My northerly relatives laugh when we shut down for snow or icy conditions but we don’t have all the toys they have. If these were regular enough occurrences to justify a snowplow corps or whatever you call the truck that salts the road, we’d have one. But they aren’t. So we don’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t.

The truth is, we like the snow days – “snow days” being a catch all for any day off due to snow, freezing rain, or because James Spann or one of the lesser weatherfolks says there might be snow or freezing rain. Nobody can get to work except the people who own a liquor store and everybody can get to the liquor store. Kids, in particular, love snow days. Every so often we get a real event where cars are abandoned on highways and schools have to host impromptu sleep overs in the gym. Those are important because they give cover when the county preemptively calls a for closings when the weather forecast indicates the chance of something threatening and everybody wants a day off to go to the liquor store. “Better safe that sorry,” says the thirsty school board.

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Unprovoked Rant

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I’m reading A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding and Robert Graves. This struck me:

“Yet the sonnet theory can be provoked in Shakespeare’s sonnets as all pre-Shakespearian dramatic theories can be provoked in his plays.”

The sentence is in service of the authors view that it’s not enough to present as evidence of experimentation an excellent poem as excellent poems may have in them borrowings as well as innovations. I very much liked the use of “provoked.”

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POETS Day! John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

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

I started POETS Day with the Idea that there’s a roguishness to poets that pairs well with the modern end of workweek encouragement to Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I see them as day seizers.

They aren’t all outwardly roguish. It’s hard to imagine T.S. Eliot or Christina Rossetti so much as swiping a cookie, but I’m sure they had a mischievous side. Even poet by night and brisk morning walk to work/insurance agency vice president by day, Wallace Stevens, got rambunctious enough for Hemingway to punch, and he lived in Connecticut. They all have shades of misbehavior in them.

I think of them as blends, taking on, to degrees of little or lots depending on the poet, traits of three archetypes.

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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.

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“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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