Category Archives: Poetry

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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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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POETS Day! Emily Dickinson, The Myth [Updated!]

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

Baseball is over for the year. They’re still playing games, but don’t let that fool you. In a particularly cruel twist of plot the Orioles went down in three straight after coaxing long suffering fans into a state of disarmed expectation. Was it better than the old days where we would enjoy a few games at the beginning of the season but tinge that enjoyment with guarded detachment expecting we’d be mathematically eliminated from the postseason by the end of April?

At least knowing meant a stress-free summer. This year was hectic. I had to check standings a lot. Did you know there’s a team called The Devil Rays?

I guess you can call a POETS Day. I don’t know what you’ll do, though. Disillusioned baseball fan grousing period length is dictated by local custom but outside of the Pacific Northwest it’s at least a week so you’ll probably just lay around and eat Wheat Thins. Give it a shot if you want. Get out of work and try jumpstarting the weekend. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but you can sit around and do nothing at work too.

I don’t care. Either way, try reading a little verse. It can make things better or worse, depending on what you pick. A vector is a vector.

Also, I told you so.

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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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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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