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

It’s POETS Day.

Do what you must. Lie to your boss. Fake a cough at school. Invite Jamaal Bowman to do his thing. Nothing productive gets done on a Friday after lunch anyway.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, take time for a little verse.

***

“As for ‘free verse’, I expressed my view twenty-five years ago by saying that no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. No one has better cause to know than I, that a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse; though whether its authors wrote bad prose or bad verse, or bad verse in one style or in another, seems to me a matter of indifference. But only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form. It was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form or for the renewal of the old; it was an insistence upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer unity which is typical. The poem comes before form, in the sense that a form grows out of the attempt of somebody to say something; just as a system of prosody is only a formulation of the identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets influenced by each other.”
                             – T.S. Eliot “The Music of Poetry”

I very much enjoyed Paul Johnson’s book, The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage. I took a great deal from it but one of the things I most remember coming away with was an admiration for his practical appreciation of Catholicism.

He was very fond of the age and history of the Church, the scholarship and arguments – even those about angels and pin heads, which is a punch line though it shouldn’t be – of two thousand years. He felt a weight lifted. There may be facets and tenets that made no sense or seemed at odds to him, but he could put doubts aside and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that wiser and more learned heads than his had considered, deliberated, and concluded. He found faith.

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