Category Archives: Poetry

POETS Day! Ursula K. Le Guin

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Photo by Marian Wood Kolisch, Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

Happy POETS Day everybody. Another week is almost in the rearview and here comes a weekend peaking its devious head full o’possibilities over the horizon. What will you do this go round? Go for a sail? Hit the beach? Skydive? Watch an Impractical Jokers marathon?

You’re probably going to watch an Impractical Jokers marathon.

Weekends used to be more fun. Remember when you were a kid and the bell rang. You couldn’t get home, strip off your precious school clothes, throw on some Swiss cheese jeans, and hit the road on a bicycle or skateboard soon enough. You had the neighborhood gang to meet and do scampish things with. Now you watch the clock and tap stuff with your fingers when the boss isn’t looking. Stop it. You’re not a kid anymore. You’re a grown up with agency and the legal right to buy fireworks assuming you don’t live in Massachusetts or certain counties in Nevada, Wyoming, and Hawaii. Quit waiting for the prescribed departure time and do something proscribed. Carpe volutpat vestibulum. 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 just get out of there as soon as plausible. 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 had no idea Ursula K. Le Guin wrote poetry. I knew all about the fantasy and science fiction books and all the Hugos and Nebulas but her verse was totally unknown to me. I was in the poetry section at my local library trying to find the ill-advised The Dolphin by Robert Lowell where he included bits of private letters from his ex-wife in the poems and I saw Le Guin’s name on a spine. At first, I thought somebody made a mistake and one of her novels was mis-shelved but before I pulled it to give to the librarian I saw the 811 Dewey number. Sure. Why not. Lowell can wait.

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POETS Day! Ozymandias

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[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 4/8/22 which was a Friday. You can look it up.]

Apparently if you have scurvy your old scar tissue breaks down. That means that if you have an appendectomy at eighteen and then went sailing with a bunch of British pirates at age forty-eight, your surgically sewn up wound might re-open depending on the availability of citrus fruits.

That has nothing to do with this week’s column, but you come across things like that when you scan the internet for reasons to justify the theme of Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I had one of those surgeries where they take out a bloated organ when I was eighteen and the pain was immense, until. I was curled up in misery. One shot of Demerol and I learned that I could never, ever, flirt with addictive drugs. I went from every nerve ending screaming out in torturous rage to blissful serenity in a needle prick of time. People throw their lives away for that kind of high and because of that hospital visit I know why. It was awesome. It was also an awesome warning. That said, siempra di no a las drogas (I got that phrase off a box of lettuce and I’m not really sure that it translates but please play along.)

This week you are Pissing Off Early, should you accept the mission, because of an abundance of monosodium urate monohydrate crystals deposition. That’s gout to you and me.

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POETS Day! Hilaire Belloc

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

Happy POETS Day! Welcome one and all to the gateway. On the other side? Henry Fords greatest invention: The Weekend. This morning you got up as you always do and despite yourself, fell into wakefulness. After trying to tame your hair and doing whatever else is your habit to make yourself presentable you found yourself at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in your hand and burning desire not to look up at the clock because you knew what it would say. The sprint out the door left you with your hat on backwards as your arms tried to flap themselves into a coat and two blocks later, arms still flapping, you just avoided getting pinched by the bus doors and off you went. At work you wandered in and wandered out – a cigarette could help to clear your mind and make you more productive – and wandered back in and it began. Somebody from accounting started blathering on about a dinner receipt from last month and without preamble you found yourself in the cyclical nightmare and there’s nothing fair about that. No guidance counselor in high school used the word drudgery. Fie on their houses. You didn’t agree to this. Just two days a week to yourself? No. Take it back. Even if it’s just a symbolic few hours on a Friday afternoon. Take it back. End this life’s work aspirational garbage and see it as what it is: one of the thousands of potholes on the road to your happiness. Go see a show, grab a beer, meet some friends for a game, or just wander aimlessly around the park. It’s not the company’s time. It’s yours. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Do it quickly or you might forget you don’t always have to live by the rules.

***

This week’s featured poet is Hilaire Belloc. I wonder what he would call himself. He certainly was a poet but he was also a British MP, lecturer, debater, and apologist. As to the breadth of his non-poetic writings, allpoetry.com notes,

“His first book was a small volume of verse, published in 1896, and from then on a torrent of books, pamphlets, letters etc. poured from his pen. It astonishes, not only in its bulk but in its diversity; French and British history, military strategy, satire, comic and serious verse, literary criticism, topography and travel, translations, religious, social and political commentary, long-running controversies with such opponents as H.G. wells and Dr. G.G. Coulton, and hundreds of essays, fill over one hundred and fifty volumes. It is little wonder that A.P. Herbert described him as ‘the man who wrote a library’.”

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POETS Day! The Tay Bridge Disaster

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Photo by National Library of Scotland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 5/19/21 which was a Friday. You can look it up.]

Once again we have a P.O.E.T.S. Day – Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday – so do yourself a favor and weasel your way out of the office and start the weekend when the weekend should begin: on your terms.

I’ll think of you and your clever and resourceful selves enjoying a three or four o’clock cocktail as I begin my marathon drive from Birmingham to Albuquerque with a quick diversion to Austin which will be anything but quick. I’ll be jealous of you and your freedom as I bounce my way along unevenly paved Mississippi highways, constantly under construction Louisiana bottlenecks, and the terrifying Texas roadways where they trick you by letting you drive at 75 mph but then send a jet black Mustang driven by a no nonsense cleanly shaven deputy with sharp creases on his sleeve to ticket you for going 76.

Since you get to be happy and I’m at the mercy of weather and whim and eating terrible fast food at places that thinks I’m kidding when I ask for no mustard, I’m going to do something awful to you. I’m going to give you William McGonagall.

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POETS Day! William Carlos Williams

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The poet Riposte of the American poet William Carlos Williams on a wall of the building at Breestraat 81, Leiden, The Netherlands, currently hardly visible because of its bad condition. Photo by Tubantia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

I was in the shed pulling out all my POETS Day yard decorations in anticipation and I couldn’t help think but what a gosh darn special thing we got going here. I mean, golly. I know how much people hate those last few hours of work before the weekend because they make us the worst us we can be. There we are focusing on the crummy negative of being stuck in the ole grist mill when we should be pleased as punch that Henry Ford thought about us, the little guys, and invented the weekend so we can goof around with the fellas and have a few pops, go for a stroll in the park with our best girl (or guy,) or maybe take in a picture. I don’t want to be called a Holiday Harry, but that day is here again so I’ll say it: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Staying at work doesn’t do anybody any good. Show your boss how productive you’ve been this week and promise to work even harder next week. Bosses aren’t such a bad sort. Then you can walk out a few hours before the usual time, free as a bird. Maybe send him (or her) a picture of all the fun you’re having instead of sitting around the office like a gloomy Gus. If you’re up for advice I’d spend some of my bonus time in thanks to that swell holiday acronym and read some verse. You’ll be glad for it!

***

Loudon Wainwright III has a great song called TSMNWA (They Spelled My Name Wrong Again) where he sings about the frustrations of having a weird name. I can’t help hearing his voice whenever I read about or meet someone who goes by something unusual even if it’s just mildly odd: “My parents should shoulder some blame/For calling their kid a strange name.” I’m sure that William Carlos Williams wanted to have a discussion with mom and dad. “You named me William Williams?” he would ask, not without cause, though I’ve read his parents brought him up in a rigid atmosphere so maybe he passed on demanding an explanation and settled in to a lifetime of long signatures. Considering some of the anachronistic tongue-stumbler family surnames that wind up some unsuspecting kids’ middle names, that “Carlos” to break things up must have seemed a godsend.

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POETS Day! George Gordon, Lord Byron

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Photo by Lord Byron in solitary isolation by David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

The wheel keeps on turning and turning and turning ‘round. Life’s disturbingly predictable if you let it continue unmolested. Shake things up. Break the expected routine. It’s POETS Day again (that “again” in no way indicates that POETS Day is included in the bourgeois and repetitive pattern of events alluded to in the metaphor of “the wheel” whose crushing lack of spontaneity are anathema to fun and apple pie just because weeks are cyclical and POETS Day arrives with weekly regularity) and that means it’s your time to be a disruptor. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of that Hellespont you call a workplace before you drown. Your work is a vampire. It’s your weekend and you shouldn’t have to explain your motivation for leaving the job early to get a jump on the only time when the proper director (you) is on set. 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 for a happy hour priced beverage and a mid-major game, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park and people watch, or, God forbid, go for a light jog. Do what 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.

***

“He may have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know but Mary Shelley shut herself away for a weekend and wrote Frankenstein to avoid spending time with him. ‘I’m just going to go invent the whole genre of modern science fiction rather than have a conversation with that tedious jackass womanizer.’”
– My wife

That may not be the most factual accounting.

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poets day: the e.e. cummings edition

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[Ed. Note: This piece was originally posted at ordinary-times.com on 4/14/22 which was a Friday, Good Friday as a matter of fact. You can look it up.]

It’s not just P.O.E.T.S. Day, it’s Good P.O.E.T.S. day. A holy day but nonetheless a day to enjoy some clever verse and in the great Scots’ (probably) tradition connive your way out of work, find a convivial barstool before the clock strikes three, and enjoy the happy hour prices in the full glory of a Spring day.

Getting out of work early is never easy but if you are a Christian with a blasphemous streak and a true believer in the power of the confessional or cleansing prayer1, Good Friday presents a unique option. In the morning start complaining about having to skip breakfast. As the day goes on mention that you feel a headache coming on as that’s a possible side effect of fasting. Later you need to feign lightheadedness. If someone suggests you eat a candy bar or just something small to keep you going don’t just say “No.” Snap at them with a “No! Dammit!” Mood changes and irritability are side effects too.

Every once in a while, sit with your elbows on your knees and rub your eyes. Step up the irritability with a touch of fatigue and eventually someone is going to suggest that you go home. Don’t blow it at the end by hopping in your car and driving off into the nowhere near sunset. Tell everyone you’re not up to driving and call an Uber.

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POETS Day! Elizabeth Bishop

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At The Fishhouses painted by Elizabeth Bishop

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

It’s POETS Day once more, that welcome weekly wonder when we wrap ourselves in awed gratitude, warmed by thoughts of Henry Ford, visionary businessman, architect of the modern, and inventor of the weekend. Is it ingratitude towards Henry’s memory to want just a little bit more free time? Sure, the weekend is wonderful as he made it, but we all know that nothing really gets done those last few hours before the sanctioned release. People check out mentally before they clock out officially and since you’re not getting any actual work done there’s no reason for you to be there. Who’s it going to hurt if you leave at three instead of five or six? Two? 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. It’s okay. If you didn’t do everything in your power to get out of that prison you draw a paycheck from you’d be a participant in the lie that you are going to do anything of value for the company in those Friday afternoon workish twighlight hours and lying is bad. If you think about it, being there and not working is kinda like stealing. Get out. Hit a bar and catch a mid-major basketball game at happy hour prices, stroll through the zoo and make faces at the lions, call your mom. When was the last time you called your mom? The weekend begins when you say it does, assuming your boss falls for whatever shenanigans you get up to in service of your premature but deserved escape. 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.

***

Today’s featured poem is “The Map” by Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop is yet another poet who rankled mid-last-century at being included among those known as The Confessional Poets. It seems like they all objected to the name to various degrees claiming that poetic personae was separate from the poet’s and further claiming, often laughably, that obviously autobiographical narratives were some sort of ill-defined coincidence, but Bishop seems to have a point in her objection. I’ve seen her referred to as loosely associated with the Confessionals and even wrongly held up as one of them. She lost her father before she could know him. He died when she was eight months old. Her mother was institutionalized due to mental illness when she was five, and as a defacto orphan, she spent some of her childhood in Nova Scotia with her maternal grandparents, moved to Massachusetts to live with her paternal grandparents, and later to another part of Massachusetts to live with her mother’s sister and her family. An inheritance from her father left her well off. She travelled widely, moved around the U.S., and spent fifteen years in Brazil. Her homosexuality was an open secret. All of that made it into her writing at least obliquely, but who doesn’t reference their life at all? I should mention that I’ve read about twenty of her poems, of which she published only one hundred and one titles, but none of her prose, which I’ve read is more biographical than her verse. I’m not claiming to be an authority on her body of work, but from what I’ve read and what I’ve read about what I haven’t, she’s no exhibitionist and no more “confessional” than most widely-read poets of her time. She doesn’t seem to air her life out there for all to see. Certainly not enough to be grouped with John Berryman or Sylvia Plath.

She does invite you into her mind, though. It’s intimate.

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Notes from Reading Sylvia Plath for POETS Day

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The Unexpectedness of the poppies
their gratuitous beauty in
her own frozen life
               – Unknown Annotator

I checked out Sylvia Plath’s collections The Colossus and other poems and Ariel from The Emmet O’Neal Library in Mountain Brook, Alabama a week or so ago. Rather, I checked out Sylvia Plath’s collections The Colossus and other poems and Ariel from O’Neal Library, formerly The Emmet O’Neal Library until Emmet’s views on segregation that no one knew or knows about were dug up and found to be too embarrassing to city council public relations people but not so embarrassing that the O’Neal family’s, gracious benefactors it seems, name suffer as well, in Mountain Brook, Alabama a week or so ago. Someone got to Ariel before I did. Actually, lots of people got to Ariel before I did. At least I assume so. The earliest stamped date in the book, copyrighted 1966, appears to be May 7, 1987. A lot of people likely signed their name from the card that used to be in the check out sleave adhered to the last page. It’s all computerized now, of course, so the card is no more. Some library books still have them and I like to see how many people read the book, or at least took it home, before me. Not Ariel. The card is gone. I know at least one person checked it out though, because she wrote all over the place. That’s the someone I’m focusing on, because that someone went from being a someone to being someone.

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POETS Day! Sylvia Plath

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Photo by Megalit, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

Welcome to POET’S Day of the second week in Ordinary Time. Today we try to make anguish take wing, be a light for those in the land of gloom, and bring abundant joy by encouraging you to usher in the weekend a few hours early. Why wait until Friday evening when a slight bending of the truth can get you out of work in the middle of the afternoon? It’s POET’S Day by God’s sake. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, and gleefully trespass the norms that preserve our hopefully durable civilization, but be as pious about it as you can this time. Be humble and thankful at this opportunity to escape the sultry bonds of employment you’ve been given. Use the time wisely. Marvel at natures grandeur in a local park. Join in fellowship at a local watering hole before happy hour even has a chance to kick off. You deserve it. No matter how you end up spending your gotten free time (remember, stealing hours from work are only “ill gotten” if you fake being sick) maybe take a moment to enjoy a little verse.

***

This week’s POET’S Day poet is Sylvia Plath which makes banishing anguish, bringing light and abundant joy a thing of the weekend activity rather than the poem. Sorry about the bait and switch. I won’t go into her background because I want to do something different this time and break this week’s featured poem down stanza by stanza. Plath was mentally ill. She described her manic depression in a 1958 journal “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” In January of 1963 she told her doctor that she had been deeply depressed for six or seven months. In February of that year she put her head in a gas oven and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In the months before her death she wrote poems that would be posthumously collected along with a few of her previously published but uncollected works and titled Ariel, released in 1965. In the introduction, poet Robert Lowell wrote that these were composed at a furious pace, “often rushed out at the rate of two or three a day.” She and Lowell were among those known as “The Confessional Poets” with Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman among others. None of them were fond of the moniker. In The Wounded Surgeon, Adam Kirsch writes that “Plath scorned the notion of poetry as ‘some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion.’” Not that it mattered. They all were heavily autobiographical. In Ariel Plath writes of her past suicide attempts, resentments towards her father and husband, and carbon monoxide poisoning should there be any doubts that her suicide wasn’t considered long before it’s execution.

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