Category Archives: Poetry

POETS Day! Robert Frost

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

If you don’t sell beer, hot dogs, fireworks, gauze, charcoal brickettes, or are named Joey Chestnut you probably didn’t work on Tuesday. Independence Day, and the lounging inherent, is your inheritance as a citizen. But it was Tuesday. Even if you went in on Monday, did you really work? Is there any point in trying to claim productivity on a three-day work week? Accept the loss and claim the weekend now. Piss Off Early. Tomorrow’s Saturday.

CHORUS: 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, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

* * *

“Have just discovered another Amur’kn. Vurry Amur’kn, with, I think, the seeds of grace.”
-Ezra Pound in a March, 1913 letter to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry

The image of Robert Frost in my, and I assume many people’s, mind doesn’t jibe with what I conjure when thinking “Modern Poetry.”

I think of Eliot and Yeats out fastidiousing each other while Pound prowls the room in a feathered sombrero that matches his green velvet suit with blue glass buttons. H.D. oozes weird-girl-who-wears-black between visits to the flapper closet. Amy Lowell fixating, Wyndam Lewis – more of a painter but still – looking like an evil silent movie capitalist cum Byron, Wallace Stevens – no matter how buttoned down he’s supposed to have been – getting punched by Hemingway. All those varied and diverse figures share a crackling intensity. Not Frost.

Even trying to picture him in his late thirties as a newly minted expatriate, I still imagine him a grandfatherly figure who speaks a folksy but erudite Live Bait & General with a Hahvahd lilt. That image doesn’t fit with the other Moderns. He’s Sha Na Na at Woodstock.

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POETS Day! Amy Clampitt

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

“Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night / When everything’s a little clearer in the light of day / And we know the night is always gonna be here anyway?” So sang The Starland Vocal Band. “I didn’t want to write an all-out sex song,” said songwriter Bill Danoff. “I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex.” So he took the title from a Clyde’s restaurant happy hour menu in Georgetown, D.C. he ate at while his wife was having surgery for cervical cancer. “Afternoon Delight” hit number one on the charts and a POETS Day anthem was born. 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, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

I’m pretty sure my uncle worked at that Clyde’s.

***

I’m not feeling terribly Christian at the moment.

My grumpy old man mood began when The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2 caused a trip inside for a comparison with my high school copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. I was very comfortably reading in my backyard and the need for comparison annoyed me to no end.

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POETS Day! WH Auden’s “September 1, 1939”

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Photo by Herzi Pinki, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

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

This week’s POETS Day enemy de jour de week is streaming video, not for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing, but for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing and making us soft. Our leisure is lurching towards too accommodating. They are waging war against our sense of what it means to have an event. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch Knight Rider, you had to be on the couch at seven on a Friday night and turn the pliers to NBC or, and I swear this happened, your dad would tell you that it’s “No big deal,” because “They’ll re-run it over the summer.” Those were tough times, but we were tough kids; not like kids today, steeped in this post-anticipation dystopia where the universe virtually bends to their whims. What do millennials do with such a dulled sense of expectation, never to knowing the exquisite longing of flipping through the Sears Catalogue toy section? What’s it like to wake up Christmas morning to find there’s nothing left to unwrap? As P.J. O’Rourke wrote, instant credit killed the dry hump. Nobody saves up for anything anymore. They are raising a generation incapable of deferred enjoyment. So take a stand and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s your life and your weekend so why should you wai… hold on… I…

This week’s POETS Day hero de jour de week is streaming video, not for…

***

Roy Campbell despised W.H. Auden. I assume the feeling was reciprocated.

During the Spanish Civil War, Campbell and his family on occasion hid Carmelite Monks in his house in Toledo from Loyalist communists backed by Stalin. It was a sprawling house and the monks not only took refuge, but stowed church documents there. He risked his life, as well as the lives of his wife and daughters, in doing so.

On July 22, 1936, Republican militia murdered seventeen Carmelites in the streets, among them former guests of the Campbell house. Suspecting ties, militiamen searched though the home. The family, fearing such a possibility, was able to clean out crucifixes and icons from the house but there was no time to remove the trunk of papers from the monastery from the front hall. Peter Alexander, author of Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography wrote, “The search of the house was thorough, but though the militiamen leaned their rifles on the Carmelite trunk, they never thought of opening it.” Alexander points out that possession of a missal could have meant death. One of the communists found Campbell’s copy of The Divine Comedy and yelled “Italian!” and then quickly “Fascist!” Alexander again: “But Campbell, with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them that he was neutral.”

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POETS Day! Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”

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[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, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

“Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.”
– from “Swift’s Epitaph” by W.B. Yeats

Though a thorough Nationalist, it was not Yeats’ wish that Ireland should erupt in violence, but he knew a Rubicon when he saw one.

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POETS Day! Translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

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

My kids are out for summer vacation; have been for almost two weeks now. They got a preview of a classless existence twice in May. Their schools allow for a number of “snow days” every year so that should Alabama see a repeat of The Blizzard of ’93 (TM) and the world stops the kids still have the required amount of official school days on the books. If those days don’t get used the administration starts doling them out like a UN aid worker with food and nylons. Suddenly the kids are beaming on a Thursday at three o’clock because the weekend’s arrived a day early. Though floating snow days are nothing new, I was taken by surprise this year because I assumed that post COVID we all knew how to pretend that we got enough done online to meet state guidelines and wouldn’t need them anymore. But the free days popped up and graced early and mid-May Fridays with smiling children playing jacks and hopscotch on the sidewalk, sucking in their stomachs for the high-school lifeguards plus one-third their age, and doing other loveable scamp Rockwell fodder. Good for them. POETS Day knows no age restrictions. I’m taking the idea of unused excuses for off days and running with it. Never go into the half with timeouts in your pocket. Last week was my seventy-fifth POETS Day post for Ordinary Times and it passed right by me, unnoticed. I’m sure some of you were puzzled why I didn’t mention it, but I didn’t realize. This week I’m calling for a POETS Day SNOW Day where POETS stands for Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday like always and SNOW stands for Skedaddle Now. (The O and W are part of NOW so the acronym actually does work. It’s like the A would be in NASA if instead of National Aeronautics and Space Administration it was National Space Administration and they still kept it NASA, because people wouldn’t mind the A from National bleeding into the Space because they like vowels in words. A lot of people probably do think it is National Space Administration and they’ve never complained, so… it’s fine.) Take the belated celebratory free day with my tardy apology. Tell your boss you’re pissing off early in honor of the POETS Day Diamond Jubilee… No. Tell him you’re pissing off early in honor of the Diamond Jubilee. He’ll know.

***

When I first decided to write a weekly series about poets and poetry I mapped out what I wanted to do and set a few parameters. One of the first rules was that there would be no translations. I’ve broken that rule a few times but I didn’t want to be caught in a situation where I was unsure if I enjoyed the work of the poet, the translator, or the combination. When I read Pound’s Cathay, or more specifically when I read about how Pound’s Cathay came to be, my conception of translations changed.

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POETS Day! Robert Service

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

A woeful POETS Day casts a shadow on my corner of Birmingham. My local library sunk.

It flooded, actually. A pipe burst and they’ve closed to replace drywall and carpeting, and according to a “Letter from the Director,” they won’t re-open for the next few months. The Director advised patrons to hold on to borrowed books until the Mississippi State game (she didn’t phrase it that way exactly, but this being Alabama she could have) rather than return them to other branches; something about storage. I’m stuck with a Longfellow collection I’m not fond of and Lowell’s The Dolphin that I’ve read and enjoyed but am not likely to pick up again anytime soon.

For the librarians – the bearded guy who seems in charge and looks like he’s wearing a turtleneck even when he isn’t, the nice lady whose tattoos suggest a pre-librarian wilding, the young guy who paints his nails black, the persnickety guy who’s mad at me because I returned a book without the bar code it didn’t have when I checked it out but who still suspects I have a drawer full of ill-gotten bar codes in my lair, and the guy who says, without fail, “I’ve been meaning to pick up [fill in poet’s/author’s name] again,” no matter what book I check out – it was looking like an involuntary Piss Off Early, ‘Til September. The most recent missive from the Director states that they’ve found a temporary location so they’ll be back to shushing soon, but the selection of books on hand will be limited. I suspect there will be little poetry to browse.

Other locations in the Jefferson Co. system have poetry sections, but O’Neal, the nearby flooded one, was the repository. It’s where the system stores the bulk of the genre, thankfully on the second floor, and where requests are filled for patrons of other branches. It sounds like the collection will be available, but I’ll have to order what I want which means I’ll have to know what I want. I like wandering around on a Monday looking for a tempting spine. As it is, for the next few months I’ll lean mostly on my collection and internet-available poems. Be ready for revisited poets. If you thought I spent too much time talking about Pound before…

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POETS Day! Walter Savage Landor

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Walter Savage Landor

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

I like Jeopardy. They read the answer and you respond with the question? That’s crazy. Backward games fascinate me. I like the “get to know the contestants” segment after the first round of plaintiff lawyer and Rinvoq ads. Ken Jennings or Mayim Bialik, depending on who’s turn it is to be unfairly compared to Alex Trebek, says hi to each player and prompts them to tell a little about a producer-approved vignette from their life so viewers get a humanizing glimpse of the person they just made fun of for thinking the Bismarck bombarded Spitzbergen in September, 1943. A recent contestant was asked about playing in cornhole tournaments. She played in two. In one, her team placed third, but she said they did better in the other, by which I assume she meant they took second. She added that there were fewer teams in the second tournament. This wasn’t James Holzhauer with a thirty-two game win streak and reams of biographical material already spent trying to cull together some parental awws as filler. This was the woman’s first and possibly only “my life” story in front of a national audience. The big time. As it turns out, she won and became the new champion, so on the next show we got to hear the penultimate scintillating producer-approved morsel from her time on this planet: A famous person told her “Happy Mother’s Day.” As it turns out, the famous person was speaking at her daughter’s graduation so the “Happy Mother’s Day” was to the audience. But she was in it! Unfortunately, she didn’t win again so there was no dramatic rendition the following day of the time she thought her front tire was flat but it turned out to be a shadow. All we got was that she threw bean bags moderately well and sat in a crowd.

I want to know what stories the producers passed on. Did cornhole and a speech attendance get picked because they were somehow the most interesting, or was she freakishly NC-17 and everything else she shared involved farm animals and out of state fireworks? I’m imagining a wits end production meeting: “Backstage at Guns & Roses is a no-go, the statute hasn’t run out on the Florida trip one, and the airplane stunt… I keep telling her you can’t say midget on T.V. anymore but it’s like I’m speaking to Don Rickles. I can’t believe we have to go with cornhole – which is still a risk considering the mouth on her. Did she really know Adam West?”

If bean bags and general well wishes were as interesting as it got, you may be saying she needs a POETS Day release to make memorable mischief. If she’s running ultraviolet on the network-okayed colorful character spectrum and the show settled for the only stories they wouldn’t have to bleep, you may be saying she needs to be honored as a POETS Day Patron Saint. I don’t know enough to decide either way, but I am saying Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday because you have to grab a Friday afternoon away from work and watch Jeopardy. It’s on at 3:30 in my market and I’m assuming a similar time in yours. It’s a great show and that cornhole lady seemed sweet.

***

When I was in school I read all the poetry I was supposed to read. I knew about “Evangeline” and “The Faerie Queen” even if I don’t remember much now. I read Paradise Lost, “Annabelle Lee” and “The Raven,” “Leaves of Grass,” and I learned about tigers burning and despair. I still remember the first twenty-plus lines of The Canterbury Tales and can say them really fast. I also still remember old English bad words for lady parts from “The Miller’s Tale.” I did what was asked and passed the tests.

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POETS Day! Anne Sexton

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McLean Hospital, MA Photo by John Phelan, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but our kids are on the cusp of vacation, assuming they paid attention in biology class and don’t have to repeat that fetal pig desecrating nightmare stuck in a lab all summer while their friends jeep blissfully to the lake to see what the girls in class look like partially clothed. I wouldn’t wish those institutionalime hydroclorosmelling tiles on anyone. They’ll be leaping all over the place while the adults drudge away. Child is father to the man – take the lesson. You may not get a whole summer but pilfered weekday added to a weekend serves as a salve of some sort. 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 to the lake “for a swim,” or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

It was pointed out to me last week that Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton all spent time in McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital, in Massachusetts. McLean also claims Ray Charles, David Foster Wallace, and James Taylor as alumni. That I went to the same high school as Kate Jackson seems suddenly less impressive. But I did. Bea Arthur once grabbed my ass.

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POETS Day! Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin

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

Today we salute the unsung heroes of POETS Day. The Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday promise of freedom, relaxation, and entertainment ushered in a few hours before the official start of the weekend would go unfulfilled were it not for those willing to work while we play. To the bartenders, Uber drivers, ticket takers, and legally registered Nevada prostitutes we offer a heartfelt thanks. You are the wind beneath our wings. Let’s not let their sacrifice be in vain. 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 (provided you tip), lay comfortably in the grass at a local park (be sure and tell the groundskeeper how much you appreciate his work), go for a swim (fake like you’re drowning so the lifeguard can add a “Local Hero” newspaper clipping to his college applications), or God forbid, go for a light jog (thank the… jogging is antisocial.) It’s your weekend. Give a nod to those whose labors let you do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, published in 1973, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Lowell’s second; the first being for 1947’s Lord Weary’s Castle. He was the most confessional of the Confessional Poets, a name given by critics, often over the objections of the poets, rather than a formal association. As the name would imply, the Confessional Poets, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton among others, delved into their personal lives as all poets will, but they went further, blurring the line between person and persona and exposing aspects regarded usually as deeply private. Despite the Pulitzer, The Dolphin will likely be remembered as the book where Lowell went too far.

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POETS Day! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

Nobody expects POETS Day! Our chief weapon is obfuscation… obfuscation and a willingness to gleefully trespass norms…  a willingness to gleefully trespass norms and obfuscation… Our two weapons are a willingness to gleefully trespass norms and obfuscation… and irresponsibility… Our three weapons are a willingness to gleefully trespass norms, obfuscation, and irresponsibility… and an almost fanatical devotion to our own needs… Our four… no… Amongst our weapons… Amongst our weaponry… are such elements as a willingness to gleefully trespass norms, obfuscation… I’ll come in again.

It’s the fifth of May, and that can only mean one thing: It’s Sir Michael Palin’s, KCMG CBE FRGS FRGSG, birthday – he’s turning 80, if you can believe it – so be sure and Piss Off Early. Tomorrow’s Saturday and you have all manner of Palinesque activities to get up to. Cut out of work and say “Ni” at people, decry the violence inherent in the system, pine for the fjords, face some peril, or go to the lavatory. It’s your weekend and if you say it starts a few hours before quitting time, it does. Just set aside time for a little verse. You’ll be glad you did and, if you aren’t careful, you might just learn something.

***

I worked for a guy who got calls from national publications hoping to get a quote from him about this or that wine release. His restaurant had all the expected awards and an enviable reputation so invitations to industry events were regular in coming. He told me about a wine tasting he attended at the James Beard House in New York – he was from upstate New York, and I can’t help but hear his clipped hyper-regional accent as I remember this story – attended by an assortment of restaurateurs, critics, and the like.

The event was hosted by a wine maker from California; I recall being told that the maker was from Berringer, but I just checked their web site and the guy they had at the time has a distinctive name I don’t recognize, so who knows. Whoever the guy was started out by signaling an army of waiters who put a glass of white zinfandel in front of the invitees. There were snickers, raised eyebrows, bemused glances, all the things you’d expect.

“What do you smell?” he asked. I’m paraphrasing.

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