It’s POETS Day! Friday afternoons aren’t meant to be spent working. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out and grab a beer, catch a game, or stroll through the park. You’ve done your part. Enjoy the rewards.
First, a little verse.
***
Narcissus gets a bad rap.
There is a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You can read all the traits common to sufferers and a series of deficits and exuberances therapists are on the lookout for in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5th Edition. The problem is there’s no Latin. All the warning signs are kitchen table words so though it may well be true that “grandiosity” has a very specific meaning to mental health professionals, it has a more elastic meaning to the rest of us and we have an obnoxious aunt who won’t abide competing cobbler recipes, a co-worker who parks his precious convertible across two spots because he’s worried about dings, and a neighbor who thinks I like his grass clippings piled on my side of the line. By my reading of the DSM-5, they’re all a bunch of damn narcissists.
He died enthralled by his own reflection, starved because he couldn’t break gaze even to eat. Narcissus is the prime choice as patron of the self-obsessed, but there’s a hitch.
We have a long weekend ahead with Martin Luther King Day on Monday. You may think, given the holiday, it would be greedy to call for a POETS Day. That’s what they want you to think.
Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. You aren’t getting any work done on Friday afternoon before a regular weekend, much less a long one. The boss is probably halfway to his dacha as you read this. Get out, enjoy the sunshine, hit the bar, and claim the time that’s rightfully yours.
First, a little verse.
***
My favorite librarian recommended a moderate stack of books when I asked for essays attempting (essaying!) to define American poetry. As best I can explain, we’re known for our rebels. Pound wanted to make it new, Eliot stopped and restarted the world, Whitman sang to his own meter, Dickinson’s literary mentor loved her work but wasn’t sure it was even poetry. Robert Frost plays down-home, and Pound introduced him in a letter to Alice Corbin Henderson as “VURRY Amur’k’n,” but Frost was a wicked practitioner of conversational rhythms in a way that set him apart. William Carlos Williams made it his mission to set an American course, but he’s as unique as the rest of ’em.
Strip away all the innovation. What’s the commonality we find in American verse that distinguishes it from European? Is there anything? My hunt may be an exercise in eye strain. Possibly Quixotic, but I enjoy the looking.
There’s a BarBQ place a mile and a half from our house that my children like to ride their bikes to, get an order of fries, and spend an afternoon downing soda and reading books. Monday, I hopped in the car for a quick trip to the store and came up on my youngest cycling, about halfway to the restaurant, and pulled over to ask if he wanted me to pick up anything while I was out. He told me I wasn’t the first person to pull over and talk to him that afternoon. Some persnickety woman rolled down her window a block or so from our house to “Make sure everything was all right.” She told him it wasn’t safe to be out biking.
The kid is thirteen. When did it become an oddity that one of his tribe might be outside by themselves? We hope she does it again. Next time my kid is going to point at her and start screaming “Stranger Danger!” at the top of his lungs.
Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Go outside and have some fun. Make it an honest to God POETS Day. Skip out of work and be as free and independent as a kid on a bike.
***
East Coker is a real place. Barely. It’s a tiny village in Summerset set as inland as can be, sandwiched between the Bristol and English Channels, on the north and south respectively; somewhere between Southampton and Plymouth on that southernmost extension of Great Britain the Pilgrims watched sink below the horizon. Wikipedia counts the population as 1667 souls as of the last edit and pictures tell me it’s the kind of quaint English village ripe for a festival-related trio of murders only a clergyman or spinster can solve, to the embarrassment of the local constabulary.
I hope you get a gift so awesome it makes you feel like that time when you were a kid and Santa brought the big red shiny bike/doll house/basball mitt you always wanted. And I hope you have such a good time with friends and family that you forget all about whatever gift made you feel like that time you got the big red shiny bike/doll house/baseball mitt. And then the next day you get lost in a Christmas book and eat leftovers before a football nap.
It’s the best time of year. Cheers, and God bless.
***
I am the oldest of twenty-one cousins just on my mother’s side, so I get my fair share of Christmas cards. Shutterfly, Zazzle, and Adobe, to pull a few from a very long list, make it extraordinarily easy to send family portraits, family travelogue pictorial collages, and a funny one with room for the pets on the back of a decently weighted card stock. My grandfather was a dentist, and there’s something of his preventative ethic still in his great-grandchildren, aligned by height or posed in a teardrop around my cousins and their spouses, pearly whites beaming. We’re old enough that some of the great-grand-level kids tower over cousins I still consider babies. Add the same from my wife’s side, and there are enough wide-shouldered teen giants in the mix to put together a formidable 3-4 defense.
It is rainy and depressing and awful here for those who like to go outside or look out windows. Has been for a week. It’s cold, too. I’m frustrated with my senses. I don’t know how cold. If I practice, say listening to music in a formal teaching setting, I suspect I’d know a C from an A from a C flat soon enough. I’ve been on this Earth for decades and still have to check a thermostat to see how cold it is. I know it’s cold, but if I say it’s in the forties it may well be in the fifties. What a weak and imprecise sensory apparatus we wear. Defective.
I don’t know what the weather is like where you are, either. But if it’s nice out, go enjoy it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Friday afternoons are fun if you’re free.
First. A little verse.
***
“But first, a historical fragment, a digression: early in the century, Pound, poet of unsurpassable ear, declared war on the iamb. What followed, and indeed surrounded this act, was a period of enormous and profound linguistic discovery, not all of it directly related to Pound’s imperative, but all of it in some manner a shucking of constraints, all confident authority and easy bravura, as though the past were being dared to stop this inspired future. And certain of the tastes of the present moment can be traced to what we now call the Moderns, with that ominous upper case, principally our bias toward the incomplete, a taste that seems to treat the grammatical sentence as Pound treated the iamb: a soporific, a constriction, dangerously automatic and therefore unexamined.”
– Louise Glück, “Ersatz Thought,” American Originality: Essays on Poetry
I’m not a huge fan of Louise Glück’s poetry. If she were alive, I doubt she’d care one whit. People who give out the Pulitzer, the Bollinger, the Nobel, and name US Poet Laureates have already come down on her side of the taste equation. I should add that on this site I’ve held her up as a prominent practitioner of dreaded poets voice and managed not to detail any dreams resulting from Glück reading-induced narcolepsy.
That aside, I genuinely respect the woman as a poet and theorist. Her essays are brilliant, ranging things. She treats bits of process laity realizes as essential when brought up, hovered on the edge of should-have-know before. I went to the library wanting theories on American poetry: what defines it, what the rebels and revolutionaries like Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Eliot, and Stevens were rebelling against. I have my own thoughts, but I wanted confirmations and challenges. My favorite librarian was off, but a new and yet unranked librarian suggested the above American Originality, by Glück. Strong debut for the new librarian.
I went on longer than I’d planned this week, so to the point without preamble: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work. Run and be free. You’ve done your part, slaved the workweek throroughly enough. Escape the office and hit a happy hour, still sunlit park, catch a ball game, or ring up that attractive someone you’ve had a mind towards.
It’s POETS Day. Make the most of it.
But first, a little verse.
***
“I had thought of the Lycidas as a full-grown beauty—as springing up with all its parts absolute—till, in an evil hour, I was shown the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of the author, in the library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them after the latter Cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and these fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again.” – Charles Lamb, “Oxford in the Vacation”, kinda
I say “Kinda” because I’ve got lying eyes. I trust Cleanthe Brooks and Robert Penn Warren more than most. One of them wrote, in their coauthored classic Understanding Poetry, that Lamb wrote the above “in his essay ‘Oxford in the Vacation.’” The other one, no doubt, went over the final copy and approved. I read “Oxford in the Vacation,” and the quote was nowhere to be found. I ctrl F-ed it and tried to find “Lycides” on the page in case somehow a paragraph length distraction caused me to miss it. It wasn’t there.
Brooks or Warren was right, though, with the other also right but in an editorial capacity. I found an Atlantic article by Edmund Gosse in the May, 1900 issue, which the internet happened to have laying about. Gosse writes, “When Lamb came to read over these sentences, he was perhaps struck with their petulance, for they were omitted from the completed Essays of Elia [Lamb’s pen name] in 1823.” The original appeared in The London Magazine October 1820. It’s funny to me that a quotable quote about the mess of editing and rewriting was itself cut on consideration.
Were Lamb born a couple of centuries scant later, he’d wrestle with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I can’t say what opinion he’d have of the poem, only that he’d have one. The poem has been inescapable for those with poetic interests since its 1922 publication. What would he have made of The Waste Land, Centenary Edition in Full Color: A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound from Liverwright, the original publisher of the poem in book form?
It’s one thing to read that Ezra Pound excised almost two thirds of Eliot’s manuscript, quite another to see reproductions of beige typewritten pages with pencil notes, slashes, suggestions sometimes themselves slashed and rewritten, and Pound’s querysome marginalia: “Vocative?” and “Vocative??”
My favorite librarian is missing. He’s been gone ever since I asked about a collection of James Dickey poetry. We couldn’t find it in the Jefferson County system or through inter-library loan systems with universities and other institutions (I have no idea what other institutions participate in library loan systems, but I’m told there are others). He said he owned a copy of the book personally and would let me borrow his copy. I haven’t seen him since.
Did he violate a librarian code? Do they have non-competes? Did they take him away for re-education? Are there really investigators like Mr. Bookman from that Seinfeld episode? It’s like he’s been shushed out of existence.
It’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Ditch work. There’s an afternoon of fun to be had, but first take a look and make sure any library books you’ve checked out aren’t late. Be safe.
***
There’s a very good article called “Ovid in exile” in last month’s New Criterion. Ovid’s out at Columbia University. I had a stumble when I came across the embedded quote by Lisa Libes, described as a “veteran of Literature Humanities” by article author David Lehman: “Ovid was sent on a three-year furlough, returning to the syllabus briefly in 2018 before being nixed entirely.” I stumbled wondering why a 2018 controversy, settled with seeming finality in 2021, showed up as consideration meat in the October 2025 issue, but the editors published it under the “Reflections” heading and Lehman, aside from being a poet and critic is the founder and series editor of The Best American Poetry anthologies, so he can bring up what he wants when he wants and we’re all the better for it.
Per Lehman, “In plain English, the students singled out the Metamorphoses because of the Greek and Roman god’s habit of coming to earth, pursuing mortal nymphs, and raping them.” He then lists the rapes of Perserpine by Pluto, Europa by Jupiter, Philomena by Terseus, and Apollo’s attempt at Daphne.
Mississippi is where I pass on the right. Folks come from all round to make me pass them on the right in Mississippi. I saw tags from New York, and I passed them on the right in Mississippi. I saw tags from North Carolina driving 70 mph, and I passed them on the right in Mississippi. Someone driving in car with tags from neighboring Arkansas, seeing me pass him on the right in Mississippi, so loved being passed on the right in Mississippi that he let a whole train of fellow travelers dart past a slow truck in the right lane and pull up behind him before changing lanes to pass him on the right in Mississippi and then change lanes back again to pass a pick-up towing an empty trailer in the right lane some medium distance ahead. We all snaked.
I will never understand Mississippi. I read a Joan Didion novel in Louisiana. It was very good.
It’s POETS Day so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work mid afternoon. Live life in the fast lane (but actually drive fast.)
First, a little verse.
***
Edwin Muir published the piece of literary criticism, Scott and Scotland, in 1938. In it he argues if Scotland is to have a national literature, they must do away with far and wide dialects and decide on a common language.
“If Shakespeare had written in the dialect of Warwickshire, Spenser in Cockney, Ralegh in the broad Western English speech which he used, the future of English literature must have been very different, for it would have lacked a common language where all the thoughts and feelings of the English people could come together, add lustre to one another, and serve as a standard for one another.”
Glasgow sneered incomprehensibly, Edinburgh twanged nasally, and Aberdeen wore fuzzy boots.* The one language common to them all through radio, newspaper, and all the missives of empire, was English. He put it that Scots survived in nursery rhymes and “anonymous folk-song.” The old language as men lived in his time “expresses therefore only a fragment of the Scottish mind.” He made the case that the Scots, who already spoke English, needed to proceed in English in their literature. This made him very unpopular with Hugh MacDiarmid (M’Diarmid), whose “Lallan” movement, “Lallan” being a Scots pronunciation of “Lowlands,” was beating the curtains for kilts and cursing. Muir had no patience for nationalism.
Smoking looks cool. The converse is true as well. Not smoking is awkward. P.J. O’Rourke wrote, “People who don’t smoke have a terrible time finding something polite to do with their lips.” I’d say the same about their hands. Few have the Italian gift for gesturing. If there’s a desk level piece of furniture, maybe a chair back, leaning takes care of one hand. The other? I don’t know. Roll the Chapstick in your pocket? A lot of the cool people died so we bought gum and got snippy with waiters for a while. Now we’re awkward and have, on average, ten more years to kill.
In 1955, roughly 57% of American adults smoked. That number is just over 11% now. Over the course of seventy years, we have reduced the smoking share of the population by 46% points. “Non-smoking” offices became all the rage somwhere in the 80s. Everyday, 57% of the smoking workforce stepped out for a ten minute commiseration with other smokers. How many times? Twice? Three times a day? The Industrial Revolution. The Computer Revolution. New methods of management. We’ve heard myriad ways we’ve increased worker productivity but over seven back-loaded decades more than half the workforce stops taking thirty minutes a day off and we hear nothing. Something’s not right.
They don’t notice. Half of it’s make-work anyway. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Start Friday afternoon a few hours before they tell you it’s okay. They really don’t notice.
First, a little verse.
***
“When Lionel Johnson and Katharine Tynan (as she was then), and I, myself, began to reform Irish poetry, we thought to keep unbroken the thread running up to Grattan which John O’Leary had put into our hands, though it might be our business to explore new paths of the labyrinth. We sought to make a more subtle rhythm, a more organic form, than that of the older Irish poets who wrote in English, but always to remember certain ardent ideas and high attitudes of mind which were the nation itself, to our belief, so far as a nation can be summarised in the intellect.”
– W.B. Yeats “Poetry and Tradition”
Yeats and Lionel Johnson were contemporary members of the Rhymers Club when Irish mythology and history was the talk, an association Yeats credited with deepening his interest and devotion to his home and its people. The two collaborated on Poetry and Ireland: Essays by W.B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson in 1908. It seems the two were friends, but it may have been that they shared a fascination and drive to preserve a vein from the literary past and develop its admiration that it would infuse future works.
In the Victorian Era, the Brits were very competent. They had dispatches and requisitioning to attend along with all the other mechanism of empire, but suddenly they had real mechanisms in unseen number as the Industrial Revolution gained… sorry… steam. To maintain competence, a person of import suddenly had to be conversant on things that in simpler recent times were shut up in clocks or behind organ cabinetry. Now they were bigger and populating sooty factories. Sprockets and springs, cogs and belts. A piston required precision casting in a way a pitchfork didn’t. Everything had to be just so.
The age was infected through and through with exactitude so it should be no surprise that women who, pace the Queen, were left out of warring, administrating, and engineering picked up the persnickety habits of their eminently measured husbands/brothers/fathers/Darcys/Wickhams. The societal mood infected society ladies. As a result, the laying of a 5.08 x 8.89 cm calling card, a Regency convenience supercharged and transformed by the fast paced 1800s, conveyed affronts, condolences, respect, disdain, attraction, or congratulations depending on how, when, and by whom it is delivered. The result was a great deal of foot traffic, gossip, and stationer’s children attending better schools than they once had.
Initially the secret Atreides battle language of an elite few, the coded missives transmitted by font, weight, and fold were revealed to a status hungry public by newspaper articles and pamphlets funded by Big Stationery. It’s antiquated nonsense now, but arcana makes for fun cocktail party chat. If deployed at the right moment to the right audience, demonstration of obscure knowledge can be devastatingly effective.
Take your business card and bend the bottom right corner inward and leave it on your boss’s desk. This signals that you, named on the card, are leaving for a trip and so the recipient, your boss, is relieved from the duty of a reciprocal call. And then leave.
You might get fired. Not everyone is up on Victorian etiquette or thinks such things cutesy, but that’s not what’s important. It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Enjoy the weekend.
First, a little verse.
***
I found E.B. White on the poetry shelves at my local library.* That he wrote poetry was something I didn’t know that I didn’t know, to borrow a phrase from Robert Gates. It surprised me.
Like I assume is the case with most, I know White primarily as an author of ubiquitous children’s books and have repeatedly said “Oh. I forgot that was the same guy,” when reminded that he was also the White of “Strunk & White,” the two last names a handy eponym for the famous guide written by William Strunk and later revised and expanded by White, The Elements of Style.
The Columbo Game 