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

This snuck up on me. Apparently, I’ve done 99 of these things for Ordinary Times. This is the big 100.

No foolin’. I counted.

If anybody actually played along and obeyed the “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” acronym every Friday since the beginning, we are talking about significant absenteeism. That’s a lot of man-hours. It’s like stealing. Well done. Keep on going.

Give the boss whatever line he or she needs to hear. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth. Grab the weekend – your weekend – a few hours before the clock strikes bu-bye and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint. Watch a ball game. Flirt awkwardly. Go to the library computer lab, casually clasp your hands behind your back, and walk behind a row of people scanning the internet so you can pretend you’re Captain Kirk monitoring his bridge officers. It’s your time. Do with it as you please, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times: Make time for a little verse.

***

When I started writing these, I felt a little unsure because though I very much enjoyed poetry, I knew little about the nuts and bolts beyond what wisps remained from high school classes and what I picked up from a few later sallies into Graves’ published Oxford lectures. I remembered thinking Graves came off as arrogant. He was arrogant, but in the lectures I found him so in a previously unconsidered way. It was so impressive.

My copy of his lectures is not on the one shelf I absolutely know it should be on because I can picture the spine and no, it’s not in the dining room and I’m sure I remember the red on khaki title by the blue Rupert Brooke so it has to be there. I can’t put my hands on it at the moment so I can’t give you a direct quote, but Graves would read a few lines from [INSERT REVERED POET] and say something along the lines of “Where [REVERED POET REFERED TO CASUALLY BY FIRST NAME] goes wrong is that he…” and then explain how he would have improved upon someone else’s classic.

I remember reading and thinking, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” The answer is that he thinks he’s a poet of substance with as much claim to authority as those whose work he critiques. He’s right. There’s a less impressive but more important answer. He’s a guy who read a poem and has opinions.

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