Tag Archives: books

POETS Day! The Admirable Oliver St. John Gogarty

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

There’s a bar near me that goes all out for the Masters. It’s a corner place with a small walkway it annexed from the development by subtle encroachment; a table here, now two, now six tables and outdoor TVs on the wall. I don’t think they own the “patio,” but it’s theirs now.

A few years ago, sections of the windowed front were replaced by glass garage doors. In good weather, weather like today, they open up the place and it’s all one big breezy space. All of it, the interior and the squatters-rights walkway, are covered in sod for the Masters. Not rolled out astroturf. They bring in real grass. I wouldn’t think it’d look good – ripped up in seconds by beer and wine guzzler feet I assumed – but it somehow does. They have drink specials, bands at night, and always one of the best hamburgers and bowls of chili in town.

My wife and I want to head out for a bit this afternoon and hang out. We hate golf. And crowds. This stinks.

Anyway, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out of work asap and get the weekend started. The Masters is on. If you’re in Birmingham, try Otey’s in Crestline, but don’t expect a seat this weekend. Damn golf.

First, a little verse.

***

“Twelve years ago Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him in safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow. His poetry fits the incident, a gay, stoical—no, I will not withhold the word—heroic song. Irish by tradition and many ancestors, I love, though I have nothing to offer but the philosophy they deride, swashbucklers, horsemen, swift indifferent men; yet I do not think that is the sole reason, good reason though it is, why I gave him considerable space, and think him one of the great lyric poets of our age.”
– W. B. Yeats, from the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935

Oliver St. John Gogarty was a dear friend of Archie Griffith and with him, a founding member of Sinn Fein. He variously carted around Irish Republican Army members as surreptitiously as allowed by the canary yellow Rolls Royce he drove, volunteered his house as a safe house, and otherwise behaved anti-Englishly. He sided with Griffith in supporting a treaty despite internal opposition to peace within the revolutionary movement, and sat as a Free State Senator, a designation considered by many in the IRA such as Liam Lynch, as traitorous capitulation to the crown. Lynch ordered the IRA to shoot the office holders and that led to Gogarty pretending diarrhea and the escape Yeats refers to above.

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POETS Day! Yeats’s Folly

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’m off for Louisiana for a crawfish boil despite my allergy to crawfish. It’s a five hour drive so no POETS Day this week for me; more of a Piss Off Really Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Happy PORETS Day.

Crawfish boils are where I eat chicken fingers and warmed over French fries with all the kids. It’s an annual event and I’ve seen youngster chat turn with the years. Bouncy houses were all the rage once. Nerf guns next. Sports and video games discussion got animated as they grew older. My Birmingham nephew is making the trip with us. He’s fifteen and has a girlfriend. I can’t wait to tell the other kids so we can all tease him.

After we eat I’ll go hang out with the adults again. I can’t wait to tell them about my nephew’s girlfriend so we can all tease him.

For the rest of you, kick off before the boss says it’s time. Catch a ball game if the weather’s nice or pull up a barstool and watch one with something cold and delicious if it’s not. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Read a little verse first.

***

Maud Gonne was an actress and activist. That’s all the rage now.

Every starlet with a guest spot on the CW has a cause. Animal rights are a great public ingratiator, especially if you stick with pets. Saving various darters is great, but people want to strike what’s near them from a safe distance. Liking the tweet of a Hollywood pretty person who says she advocates (hate that word used that way) for the ASPCA is how an average American who thinks their jerk neighbor leaves his dog outside too long can feel involved. Cancer advocacy (counter to a strict reading with diseases but still gets used) is big. Emma Watson only wears ecominical clothes. The actors I most admire fight against injustice. Somebody has to.

There are issue advisors and advocacy directors for the indecisive. It’s not enough to be good at pretending to be other people. You have to be down with a cause if you’re going to stand out in today’s Hollywood or basement with a backdrop for your YouTube channel. Everybody’s an activist.

Maud founded Sinn Féin.

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POETS Day! Lascelles Abercrombie

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I sold my basketball fandom to my wife when we were dating. It wasn’t a big deal. This was back in 99 or 00, so Alabama was mid to bad and she’s a Duke grad. I don’t really care for the game anyway and it didn’t seem to be much of a conflict since Alabama and Duke were unlikely to cross paths in any meaningful way on the court. I got her football fandom in the trade for the same reason.

Now that Alabama is as good as they are, I should care more. I want them to do well, but it’s bouncy hoopty ball. It helps that I’m a jinx. I don’t watch Alabama games anymore. When I do they lose, and that’s bad because football recruits like to go to schools with good basketball teams too. All-around success by the whole athletic department is claimed as a draw for them. I’ve tuned into a game the Tide is winning and watched the lead slip away, turned it off, and checked my score app to see it reestablished. It’s uncanny.

I do my best to support non-college-football tournaments and such for the spectacle. They’re fun. In 2023, I foolishly hopped in a car with my brother in-law and headed to Louisville where I made Bama lose a Sweet Sixteen matchup with San Diego Sate University. Seriously. San Diego State.

Conference playoffs are afoot. I won’t be watching Alabama’s tip off at 7:15 tomorrow night against TBA, as of this writing. I may watch Duke play UNC at 6:00. I will definitely head to a restaurant for some of the day games even if I don’t pay too much attention. You don’t need a dog in the hunt or even a like of the game to enjoy the excitement of a basketball tournament like you don’t need to be a golf fan to have Augusta on your bucket list.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Take a POETS Day and watch the fast-paced game fans say they love devolve into an hour of last minute fouling, free throw, fouling, free throw. Keep a baseball game on your phone in case you get bored (Braves v Nats, 12:05 CDT).

Try a little verse first. Roll Devils.

***

It is our tariff on imported books. Unless an author is almost certain to appeal to a large audience, in which case his book will be manufactured in America, the publisher can import only a small edition in sheets and sell it at a relatively high price. That means that he cannot do any thing to push the book, and so the author who is not known, so to speak, to begin with, has very little chance with the American public…

That Mr. Abercrombie’s early work did not immediately surmount the handicap of being imported in a very small edition is due in part to its character and in part to our taste.
               – Llewellyn Jones, The North American Review, Dec., 1924

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POETS Day! William Makepeace Thackeray

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I was chatting with a guy from New Jersey yesterday. It was cold and glum in Alabama. He was making fun of me for acting as if temperatures in the thirties were Armageddon-ish and I shook my head and mumbled something like “…wouldn’t last a second around here in August… humidity.”

He showed me an amazing foul weather trick so epoch shaking I might deign to call it a life-hack. “If you are ever bothered by the weather,” he said, “take out your phone, pull up your weather app, and bring up Iowa City, Iowa.” He demonstrated. It was 9° with a blue subscript that read “feels like 7°.”

According to Wikipedia, there are 171,000 people living in the greater Iowa City Metropolitan Area. I don’t know how that’s possible. It’s POETS Day. Look outside. Now look at your phone weather app, type in Iowa City, Iowa, and look outside again. There are 341,000,000 people in this country, and in comparison, no matter what it looked like out that window, 340,829,000 of you just realized what a beautiful day you’ve been blessed with.

It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Have at it.

First, a little verse.

***

I usually come across one or two odd and interesting facts when looking into the lives of poets for these posts, and want as I might, I can’t shoehorn or wrestle them into sense with even the loosest narrative, and I can get pretty loose. I found two this week while reading up on the life of William Makepeace Thackeray and I like them too much to discard. I don’t know if it’s still an aside when you haven’t begun anything to momentarily distract from, but a couple of quick asides if you… whether you mind or not, I guess.

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POETS Day! John Keats at Last, Apparently

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Illustration by Rene Sears, who defensively replied “I don’t know. Ask him why he had so many wings in his poetry.”

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

I’m making meatballs for the weekend, and like all the best meatball recipes, the key ingredient in mine is lies. There’s a lot of time spent between minimal exertions of effort. It really is easy, but there’s a fine tradition of pretending to pretend that you didn’t mind cooking – which you barely did – at all. You have to master saying “Oh, it was nothing,” when it really was nothing so it sounds like it you were saying it was nothing when we all know it was something, but you guys are worth it. Oh, Stop it. Really.

I wrote about the recipe and duplicitous grandmotherly types at OT almost a year ago. Feel free to give it a go, but if you’re going to pretend to take a long time putting dinner together, you’d best cover your tracks and get work complicit in the cover story by ducking out of the job mid-Friday. That way, if anybody doubts you spent all day slaving over a hot stove instead of mixing stuff up in a bowl, popping it in the oven while you do gods know what, and then briefly checking in to finish things off with a few hours of unattended simmering, you can say, “Oh yeah? Well, I wasn’t at work, though I’d prefer you not check because then they might think I wasn’t really sick.”

It’s POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Mangia!

But first, some verse.

***

I could have sworn I’d already done a POETS Day on Keats. This week I’ve been reading about him with a mindset intent on shutting out basic biography I must have covered previously. I figured that, mistakenly but mistakenly was ascendant, having done Keats I’d done “Ode on a Grecian Urn” because that’s the one you have to do even if you’re going through the motions to have it behind you, field cleared for stuff people might not already know.

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POETS Day! A Few Poems by Kingsley Amis as Pretense to Discuss One of His Novels

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I don’t like poinsettias and take comfort in the fact that they usually do the honorable thing and die shortly after Christmas time. They’re fine in season I suppose, but so are ugly sweaters and bells on adult shoes.

They’re poisonous flowers, I think. I read that people who don’t like cats but somehow ended up with one buy poinsettias intending to plead ignorance later and get on with their lives. Ours is still in the kitchen thriving in its pot so I daydream about adopting some sort of reverse cat that’s poisonous to poinsettias.

I’m supposed to be encouraging you to take a POETS Day, but I’m distracted by this velveteen-flop looking plant with one petal beginning to wilt and a couple of dozen more that won’t follow its example. I’m distracted like you might be on a Friday afternoon, so preoccupied with weekend thoughts that you can’t get any poinsettia work done, sitting performatively, wasting your time. You should Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Read a poem first.

***

I’ve written about Kingsley Amis in this space numerous times (see here, here, here, and here). I’m an unabashed fan so an unapologetic writer though I don’t claim any “Best” titles for him. There are better novelists, better poets, better editors, and your average park bench made for a better husband. He simply seems to be the writer I like most most of the time.

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POETS Day! Poems Found While Reading an Essay by Anthony Hecht

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

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

There’s a constant drip to my life now. A background sound would imply direction. This isn’t that. This ubiquitous drip, this relentless hydro-metronome, reverberates from the porcelain of the bathroom behind me, the steel of the kitchen I’m in, and somehow through two bedroom doors from the other bathroom. It is of the house.

In 2010, a cold snap came. We were newly minted homeowners, landed for only a week at the time. The inspection report showed an open heating duct in the crawlspace so I donned my fiscal responsibility hat and had the duct capped immediately on moving in. The pipes froze a few days later and one burst a day or two after that. Chesterton’s fence was under my house.

In Wisconsin and other Big10 locales, pipes are insulated or designed to expand somehow. I’ve read about systems where conductive wires are wrapped around water pipes to provide warmth when switched on. This is all Star Trek stuff to Alabamians. Nobody has that here so we drip our faucets.

It hasn’t been above freezing for three days now. The drip haunts me. Mocks me. Its maddening report more assault than assurance. But what if it stops?

Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Nothing gets done at work on a Friday afternoon anyway, so go do fun stuff. Or if you live in Alabama, go home and listen. Listen and fear.

Drip. Drip. Dri…

***

I have a copy of Anthony Hecht’s Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry I keep on hand when I’m in the mood. It sits in a stack with Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History by William Logan, the collection of T.S. Eliot essays, Poetry and Poets, and a few like. Sometimes I think I enjoy reading about poetry, criticism and commentary, more than I like reading actual poetry. That might not be odd, but I think it is, and it warms my vanity as personal idiosyncrasies will.

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POETS Day! John Clare

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Linocut by Rene Sears

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

You may have to shop. If you get too much from Amazon, they know. The thought actually counts and a bit of wear on your shoe leather should be on display.

It’s like wrapping. A perfect bow with the curly ribbons you get from running a scissor along the length real quick like you’re pull starting a chainsaw is wonderful to look at, but if you’re a twenty year old college guy with stylishly unkempt hair and smell like cherry vape, everyone knows you didn’t wrap that gift yourself. Small tears on the corners and a piece of masking tape, because the scotch tape ran out, lets grandma know you care.

That doesn’t mean shopping should impinge on regularly scheduled loafing time. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of a useless lame duck Friday afternoon. Shopping isn’t fun, but getting out of work always is.

Before you do, take a minute for some verse.

***

“Many reviewers greeted John Clare with enthusiasm, hoping for a noble savage, an uncomplicated mind, freed from the artificial systems inculcated by formal education. Such fanciful suggestions of his isolation from the world of books have proved remarkably persistent. His eagerness to see his work in print has too often been forgotten in the various dubious attempts to portray him as innocent of the vicious preoccupations of the publishing trade.” – Paul Chirico

Several things had happened. In 1800, Robert Bloomfield erupted from seemingly nowhere selling a quick twenty-five thousand copies of The Farmer’s Boy; a labor class (labour in la lingua anglaise) kid whose little formal education but increased talent folded into a public taste bent towards Wordsworth and his Romanticism. The idea that poetry sprung from nature, pure and unadulterated by aristocratic letters was heady stuff in the early 1800s. The even larger eruption of George Gordon, Lord Byron on the scene in 1819, showed a public thirsty for, and kindled the concept of, stardom.

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POETS Day! Thomas Hardy Learns About Dames

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

We’re suffering Sudden Onset Fall. The leaves all dropped yesterday. Crunchy steps echo in the dark because dusk is a five minute period between school pick-up and the dog expecting dinner. I need a sweater to take my evening walk with my wife and by the time I get to the creek – I assume there’s a creek because there was a few days ago though I can’t see it without a flashlight – I need a coat.

When my wife and I started dating we were free and laughing, uncaring and unworried about what others thought. We’re all that stuff now, but with worse knees. Still, I’m suddenly caring about what others think a great deal when walking next to my bride as she’s decked out in a halogen beaming nylon harness get-up with safety red lights warning traffic off us. It’s a ridiculous get-up that I find prudent only because it’s so bright no one can make out our faces for the glare.

Make it a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t let work pin you in and take what little sunlight God and Congress have allowed. Get out of there and enjoy yourselves.

Wear a sweater.

***

I’ve read praises of Thomas Hardy from Auden, Pound, Ransom, Larkin, and Frost. That’s a short list with recognizable notables to make the point that he’s respected by those whose respect is worthy of attention, but that list is far from exhaustive. Hardy was considered by many to be the greatest literary mind of his time and Max Gate, as his home in Dorchester was known, the end point of pilgrimages by Sassoon and Graves; again, not exhaustive. He was held in awe.

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POETS Day! Horace: Ode III, XXX

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

EnterpriseAppsToday’s web site has a number of statistics related to work place time wasting. It’s eye opening. Some selected bits – a few iotum or datum if you know not much latin:

In the United States, during 8 hours of working time, employees waste an average of 2.9 hours by doing no effective work.

31% of workers waste a minimum of 1 hour each workday.

6% of employees waste around 3 hours each day at work.

4% of workers claim they waste at least 4 hours daily in the workplace.

If employees in general waste 2.9 hours each, but only 6% waste 3 hours and 4% waste 4 hours, and 31% waste 1 hour, then the remaining 59% have to waste 3.89 hours a day. I don’t think people present 6% at 3 hours and 4% at 4 hours when there’s a whopping 59% at 3.89 hours going unmentioned. That’s not how you present facts. If you’re trying to show that time wasting at work is rampant, do you leave out the biggest cohort at almost the highest time waste rate but leave in 6% at a measly 3 hours? No. They made all of that up.

Even the people who compile employee time wasting figures aren’t giving the matter proper attention. Don’t feel bad skipping out of work early. Nothing’s getting done there anyway. Have a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First though, take a minute for some verse.

***

Suetonius writes that Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to most of us as Horace, was military tribune under Brutus. This was two years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, so there was no “Shocked!” moment or questions about honor when Horace took up arms with the man. He was at Philippi for Octavian’s victory and would later claim to have left his shield behind and fled, but running off without a shield was an act claimed by Greek poets he admired and was probably a joke.

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