Category Archives: Poetry

POETS Day! The Villanelle

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

Back when I managed a pirate’s crew of waiters and bartenders I grew to accept that a set percentage of my charges was damaged, irredeemable, and blessedly transient. Exhibit A would be Stony McStonerton (not her real name.) Stony was the illegally baffled eighteen year old child of a large wealthy family. You knew she grew up rich because both her first and last names were last names. We got the dirt on her from one of our other employees, her cousin, who had the same two last names but in a different order. Stony struggled to be the black sheep in a family full of sootiness. The competition proved daunting so she retreated into a bong and watched the parade, figuring whatever direction trouble came from there would be a bail out so why not enjoy the show. One big weekend – Valentine’s or some such – when we needed all hands she asked off to see a band in Atlanta. We couldn’t let her go so she gave us the usual shrug, but there was something different about the gesture this time. In retrospect I’d say it lacked her trademark resignation. Five minutes before the Friday shift she called in sounding miserable and claiming sickness. The caller ID said Holiday Inn, Atlanta, GA. Stony was terrible at POETS Day. Her version of the Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday battle cry whimpered along I-20 and flounced, exhausted, in the restaurant’s back office. But… but you have to admire that she stayed true to herself. She could be counted on not to be counted on and through her lack of effort we confirm that the POETS Day spirit dwells within us all, just longing to be free. This POETS Day let’s reach out to those least capable of deceit and include them in our plans, and not just as convenient patsies if things go south or because they might put everything on some uncle’s credit card again. Get out of work early, soak in some sun, and see what bands are playing. It’s your weekend. Don’t wait for permission to get it started. In the meantime, maybe a little verse?

***

I just read that villanelles are sometimes called villanesques. I’ve not heard that before but suddenly I wish that they were usually called villanesques and only sometimes called villanelles. I’m picturing a poetic Legion of Doom with Hilaire Belloc and Sylvia Plath as Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, a mustachioed Rupert Brooke twirling Snidely Whiplash style in the corner, and a cackling Marianne Moore studying tarot cards while absently twisting the arm off an Ida Tarbell voodoo doll. T.S. Eliot makes a natural Moriarty.

“What manner of villainy are you poets up to?”

“We’re not up to any villainy, detective. It’s just a little villanesque.”

Missed opportunity.

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POETS Day! Li Bai, Ernest Fenollosa, and Ezra Pound

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

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the episodes of Days of Our Lives dutifully unwatched by a somnambulist workforce blindly attending to responsibilities. Thanks to the protestant work ethic supposedly dying in the United States, the world’s longest running scripted T.V. (television) show is now streaming on something called Peacock Network; premium subscription only. Want to know how Kristen reacts to the revelation that she and Megan are really sisters? What Brady, who won’t take Kristen’s desperate jailhouse calls, will do now that Vic’s name came up during her hypnosis session with Steph? Too bad. That’s for Premium Members only. This is on you, POETS Day people. Daytime shows die when people slack off viewing in favor of work. Days of Our Lives lost its regularly scheduled slot, but it’s not too late to save Judge Judy, Let’s Make a Deal, and so many others. There are good, honest, salt-of-the-Earth types in Hollywood. They don’t ask much. Just Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. That three or four hours at the end of the week is what?… Time to write a sales projection report for your employer? Maybe an inventory of pre-stressed cement planks? It doesn’t seem like a lot to you and me, but that little bit of extra viewing might mean a new Fendi stroller for a Hollywood pre-toddler or a new Grayson Perry ceramic vase lending his trademark incongruity to a lonely Hollywood etagere. So lie, dissemble, fudge the truth, whatever you need to do to get out of work in the wee PM hours and get a jump start on the weekend. Go to a neighborhood watering hole. Ask the barman to turn off the afternoon baseball game and turn on something Wapneresque. Even thirty minutes a week watching I Love Lucy reruns on a fledgling local network may raise the ratings enough to interest a plaintiff’s attorney in purchasing a life giving ad spot. Act now before all our gameshows, small claims court dramas, tabloid talk formats, and yes, even our stories are gone. The next Oprah is out there waiting. But as always, make time for a little verse.

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The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance

The jeweled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

                                             By Rihaku.

Note. – Jewel stairs, therefore a place. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain, of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

Ezra Pound once wrote that he was, not without cause, accused of selling his notebooks. If you’ve ever read “How to Read” or any of the essays in ABC of Reading you’ll know what he means and be grateful for it. His prose invites a peak into his thought process and breadth of comparison. The above is an excerpt from his book Cathay, Translations by Ezra Pound and lengthily subtitled For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga. The above poem is the only one from that collection with appended notes making it the most interesting entry in the collection.

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POETS Day! Kit Marlowe v Sir Walter Ralegh

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

“After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees…he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…”
– Sir William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, 1752

And that is how Isaac Newton invented gravity. I had a similar revelation regarding POETS Day this morning. It wasn’t an apple that ushered in my Eureka moment. It wasn’t even a fruit. It was Spectrum, my internet provider, coincidently named after another of Newton’s inventions: the rainbow. Spectrum was at my house at the appointed time, and it was a specific time. They said they’d be there at twelve noon and there they were, practically shadowless. This is a freakish turn to those who are now, or may have earlier been, a customer of another national provider whose attempts to meet a four hour window for troubleshooting or repairing connectivity are aspirational at best. I won’t mention that particular company by name because I don’t want to attack them directly or bring any attention to them at all for that matter, but they definitely need to adopt a better attitude towards customer relations. Anyway, I realized that occasionally we should reach beyond the POETS Day mantra of Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Let’s skip the whole day and blame it on the internet company. You think poetry speaks to a shared humanity? Bring up tech support phone trees in a room full of strangers and witness communion. Tell your boss and co-workers that the cable people – that’s what I still call them because I’m an old – say they’re coming in the morning. Put on your doubtful face and say “They told me nine, but…” You’re out with just the one fib. No trespassing the delicate pieties of society. No trampling of norms. You’re free. Beer with lunch, flirting with strangers, naps, baseball. It’s all yours for the taking. Remember to read a little verse for edification.

***

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe set the Elizabethan theater world on fire by not rhyming. His disdain of “jygging vaines of riming mother wits” gave us the blank verse plays Tamburlaine the Great and The Tragical History of the Life of Doctor Faustus, most notable for the immortal-to-date line, “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships..?” When he was denied his masters from Cambridge in 1587 for gross absenteeism, Archbishop Whitgift, Lord Burghley, and Sir Christopher Hatton signed a letter on his behalf. It read:

“Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine, Their Lordships thought good to certefie that he had no such intent, but that in all his accions he had behaved him selfe orderlie and discreetlie wherebie he had done her Majestie good service, & deserved to be rewarded for his faithfull dealinge.”

That the three signees were all members of Queen Elizabeth’s privy council no doubt carried tremendous weight, but the heft of the letter is carried by the six letters probably – they sided with C.S. Lewis on orthograffi back then – not misspelling Reames, as Rhiems was the site of a Jesuit plot against the Queen that was foiled in 1586, the time of Marlowe’s absences, by undercover agents deployed by M’s Renaissance predecessor, Sir Francis Walsingham. Cambridge awarded him the degree.

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POETS Day! Andrew Marvell

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Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

Remember when you were a kid and every other kid in the neighborhood got a pony and you didn’t even know you wanted a pony but suddenly you had to have one? Everybody’s playing with ChatGPT. How did I make it all these years without a clockwork house elf serving uncanny valley made-to-order imitations of Metallica songs for my amusement? I asked it to do the Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday introductory paragraph for me this week. Courtesy of our soon to be overlord:

Write an intro paragraph like ordinary-times POETS Day.

Ah, finally it’s that time of the week again! It’s POETS Day, my friends! For those of you who may not know, POETS stands for “Push Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.” It’s the day when the office clock seems to slow down to a crawl and everyone is counting down the minutes until they can head out and enjoy the weekend. Whether you’re planning on hitting the town or just relaxing at home, there’s no denying the excitement that comes with the start of the weekend. So, let’s wrap up those last few tasks and get ready to let our hair down – after all, it’s POETS Day!

Write an intro haiku like ordinary-times.com POETS Day.

POETS Day arrives,
A break from the daily grind,
Weekend, unbound joy.

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POETS Day! HD, as in Hilda Doolittle

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

Yesterday was opening day. You’d think Major League Baseball would feature all manner of get out of work early fare for the first Friday of the season but it doesn’t. The earliest game starts at 6:40 ET. That’s a bit too late on the East coast and probably around midnight or so on the West coast, but I may be off there – the metric system never made sense to me. How do people play hooky to see a game that doesn’t start until they get off work? I don’t want to trot out “You’re either for us or you’re against us,” for MLB because they’ve been such a friend to POETS Day in the past, but I feel like they dropped the ball here. That said, baseball’s error is no excuse for you to lay down on laying down on the job. The weekend starts when you say it does. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Consider your boss and get your mind right. That’s the enemy. Hold nothing back. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass whatever norms and delicate pieties are left to 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 to watch yesterday’s highlights and some pre-game blather, tap your fingers impatiently on the bleachers of a local ball park, realize that it doesn’t matter how the long the line is for a hot dog considering that it’ll be God knows how long before the first pitch, or heavens forfend, throw up your hands in frustration and watch soccer. 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.

***

The anonymous writer of the bio for Hilda Doolittle at the invaluable Poetry Foundation notes that the poet suffers from early success. “H.D.’s justified reputation as the greatest and purest imagist paradoxically led to a critical cage whose perpetrators either lamented the fact that she stopped writing perfect gems or persisted in discussing five and ignoring 45 years of poetic development.” She wrote remarkably later in life and while I’ve read bits from that period I’m not at all as familiar with the later as I’ve become with the earlier. Scholarship since the 1970s, no doubt to the delight of the bio writer, celebrates the whole body of her work as remarkable. “Helen of Egypt” (1961) is held out as particularly significant.

Call me a Philistine, but I’m currently interested in her early Imagist period and will persist in my admiration of five at the expense of what followed. It was Glenn Hughes, author of Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry (1931), who first referred to Doolittle as “the purist imagist.” In the 1913 issue of “Poetry” a set of three poetic principles as put forth by the three original Imagistes: Ezra Pound, Doolittle, and her husband Richard Aldington.

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POETS Day! Wallace Stevens

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

***

When most people think of a poet, what one looks like as they go about their business, they probably think of someone Byronic leaning over a battered wooden table, scribbling mid inhale on a loose sheet of paper, fingers inkpot stained, a girdle-tight vest over whatever style puffy shirt the modern mind thinks was always in vogue before mass produced mirrors, a vee of dark curls fopping over the upstage eye like a bunch of wine grapes, the interior of the tent improbably well lit by a single candle, and the air still redolent of gun smoke from day’s battle for Greek independence. Poets may not be of the Romantic school, but we think they should look like they are.

At a favorite holiday spot in Key West, he got into a voluble argument with Robert Frost on at least two different occasions, and once he slugged the man he considered the anti-poetic devil. Per Stevens biographer Paul Mariani, “So it began, with Stevens swinging at the bespectacled [Ernest] Hemingway, who seemed to weave like a shark, and Papa hitting him one-two and Stevens going down ‘spectacularly,’ as Hemingway would remember it, into a puddle of fresh rainwater.” He did manage to land at least one blow, apparently breaking his hand on Hemingway’s jaw.

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POETS Day! Delmore Schwartz

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Delmore Schwartz

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

This is one of those weekends where POETS Day gets lost in the wash. The first week of March Madness is a triumph of unproductivity. It’s not that the NCAA Tournament is so compelling that even non-basketball fans get into the excitement. It’s that basketball fans get so excited by it that they think it perfectly natural that people who don’t otherwise like the game would suddenly get swept up by the spectacle and those who don’t care realize that by pretending to care as much as basketball fans think they should they get to half ass it at work, take long lunches, use the copy machine to print endless personal documents, call their friends whenever they feel the urge, watch T.V. (television) on their phones at their desk, openly gamble, and leave early to catch the late afternoon game just like everyone else. Their bracket, chosen solely on the basis of which mascot is cuter, is just as likely as the fans’ to win a couple of hundred bucks too. So go do whatever. I don’t even think you have to ask to leave early. Go take a nap, hike a bit, marvel at how uncrowded places without walls of televisions are. Just be ready to talk about a blown call or an amazing comeback in one of the games you were supposedly watching. People will put the important-for-conversation clips on Twitter. As always, don’t let the weekend go by without a little verse. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday… even if everybody pissed off before Thursday’s tip off. If the basketball thing doesn’t spring you, there’s always St. Patrick’s Day to fall back on. Erin Roll Tide!

***

When Delmore Schwartz was twenty-five years old, he made a huge splash in New York intellectual circles with the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The book, a collection of short stories and poems, was well spoken of by two of the time’s giants in Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. He was fresh and talented and people predicted a great deal from him, which he delivered for a while. When he died, it was three days before anyone identified the body. Friends said they hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. Alcohol, drug addiction, and insanity wore him down.

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POETS Day! Paul Lawrence Dunbar

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Howard Univ., Washington, D.C., ca. 1900 – class picture.
Paul Laurence Dunbar is in the upper right.

[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 8/5/22 which was a Friday. You can look it up.]

I’ve spent a great deal of energy not checking Facebook. I’d go in once a month or so and see whose birthday I missed or who’s moving on to a different job. I’m kind of a hermit so I would otherwise miss out on such things. Two or three years ago, I ran into a friend in the grocery store and asked about her family and her husband and I managed to inquire a few weeks after their divorce was finalized. That was an embarrassing in depth conversation in the produce section and well documented on Facebook had I been watching. I recently missed something else that was happening, something important. Now I’m checking in to the site every other day.

What I’ve seen has got me thinking about all the myriad life changes I see reported on the site. How can Facebook be weaponized to plausibly give credence to the great goal of Fridays: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday?

There are all manner of minor emergencies reported on that site. People stuck with flat tires, a tree falls in the yard, a kid falls out of a tree so you get a smiling picture with a new cast. You can get creative and find a clever way to bend such posts to your purpose assuming there is one that pops up on a Friday afternoon, but the posts are tagged with a real person’s name and for all you know the boss is a friend or acquaintance or a committed bondage submissive of the person you claim to leave early to help. That can get messy. Make a fake account.

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POETS Day! Marianne Moore

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

If you lived in France, you’d already be home by… actually you’d still be at work. Turns out that thirty-five hour work week we hear about is just something the French pretend to enjoy the way they pretend everybody in their family tree that’s old enough to be dead was part of La Resistance, stood up to Robespierre, or was Charlemagne (that last one’s true though.) They had me there. I thought those Gallic geniuses really had the four-day work week worked out, that they were the P.O.E.T.S. Day legends of song come alive. Their failure and subsequent fakery should not deter you. P.O.E.T.S. Day, like the war against the Axis, doesn’t require France to succeed. It’s still your time that’s being squandered in the waning hours of the workweek as organizational inertia forces you and your co-workers to go through the motions of production. Nobody’s getting anything done after lunchtime on Friday. It’s clock watching, text messaging, and paper shuffling until the whistle blows. Don’t be part of the farce. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Tell your boss whatever you have to. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, whatever. Your presence at your place of employment on a Friday afternoon is in service of the lie that you aren’t already mentally at the bar or the ballpark, wandering through a pleasant park, or dropping by a special someone’s for a bit of reverence. 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 delicate pieties and so were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

“It should be revised, Mr. Goodwin; wish it were better — I value your forbearance; — am encouraged that with all its faults you care to own it.”

Marianne Moore wrote that to Johnathan Goodwin on the front flyleaf of a first edition copy of her collection Poems, released in 1921. It sold for $3,824 at Christie’s in 2002. The inscription is dated July 7, 1962. I like that. It shows that she knows how to hold a grudge. The book was published behind her back without her permission by her former Bryn Mawr classmate, the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle,) and her partner, the English novelist, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman of the ship owning Ellermans if you must know, but we don’t put on airs around here.) Moore is said to have disapproved of the selection and layout but was not displeased by the cover.

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P.O.E.T.S. Day! Hart Crane

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

Just when you thought it would never end, classical mechanics saves the day. We’ve spun through another week and that blessed moment when the whistle blows, it’s time to punch out, and traffic swells is almost upon us. Why wait? It’s P.O.E.T.S. Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s no reason to stick around when even the boss has mentally gone fishing. You’re not going to get anything done. At least not done well. Get out of there. Dissemble, obfuscate, ignore the niceties that lubricate the engine of society. There are mid-major basketball games to watch. Head on down to the bar a few hours before you’re “allowed” and have a happy hour beer. No one’s going to notice. Head to the park or the zoo. Browse a book store with a sleeved cup of that overpriced coffee they sell there. I wouldn’t go fishing because the boss might decide to slip out early too and that could get awkward, but hey, it’s your time. Take it. Do with it as you will. That said, may I suggest in homage to the mighty acronym, 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 niceties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

This week’s poet is Hart Crane and his poetry can be a bit hard to grasp. That’s not just me being obtuse. Harrison Smith from the publishing house Harcourt, Brace wrote “I feel certain you are a genuine poet-and there are not many genuine poets lying around these days. . . . It really is the most perplexing kind of poetry. One reads it with a growing irritation, not at you but at himself, for the denseness of one’s own intellect.” The critic Edmund Wilson wrote he had “a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was … not … applied to any subject at all.”

It was though. His style was applied to a great many things as he aptly explained to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine in the 1920s, in a letter responding to her concerns about his submission, this week’s featured poem, “At Melville’s Tomb.” Previously Marianne Moore wrote to him, when rejecting an earlier poem for publication in Dial, “its multiform content accounts, I suppose, for what seems to us a lack of simplicity and cumulative force.” T.S. Eliot passed on the same poem for The Criterion. I imagine Crane jumped at the opportunity Monroe offered to explain his poetic choices, or his “rationale of metaphor,” to the editor of one of the more influential periodicals.

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