[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.

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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.