Tag Archives: Literature

POETS Day! Dryden and Marvell were Mean Girls

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I survived the Oscars thanks to Tom Hanks. My weekly Sunday night dinner crew is cavalcade of wonderful people with one tragic flaw that flies in bitter conflict with my own. Theirs is that, despite many degrees, they love watching awards shows. Mine is that I never check the award show calendar so I know which weeks to pretend to be sick and stay home.

I was warned this go round. I bemoaned my predicament mid Grammies on Twitter and a friend responded with the date and air time of the next trap, the dreaded Academy Awards. I forgot. Thankfully, three time Best Actor Award winner Tom Hanks, in what I see as a clear attempt to shut the door behind him and broach no competition, is narrating a great nature show about ‘Merica that aired opposite the movie self-love fest. If there’s one thing my Sunday dinner crew likes more than awards shows, it’s nature shows. Thank you, Tom. You’re showing God’s work.

The show was beautiful, and it’s all right here stuff. We’re in America. You should go out and see it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work and spend an afternoon admiring the bounty we’re soaking in. If it’s raining, see if Tom’s show is streaming.

First, a little verse.

***

“Dan Brown?” This was after a few hundred feet of pondering.

“He was hugely popular.”

“Yeah, and his books are objectively not good.”

“He sold something like 80 million copies.”

“Something like that.” We went left towards the put-in. Our afternoon walks go left towards the put-in when weather allows and whim concedes a longer go along the creek. Right takes us home. “What about Stephanie Meyer?”

“She sold a billion.”

“Yeah, but if you played a drinking game and drank every time someone’s eyes were described as golden or bronze, your liver would fall out. Oh! Fenimore Cooper.” When my wife, when anybody, drops the James in James Fenimore Cooper, you know she’s thinking about Twain’s “The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper.” That’d be fun to read again.

“What about Carrot Top?” And there, crossing the little rill that bisects the westernmost widening of the park as the first owl of the still lit evening sounded from somewhere back a ways on the far bank, I realized that I was seriously thinking about how to interpret Carrot Top’s career.

The thing is, I’ve laughed at his stand up. I’m not a fan, but from what I’ve seen he gets one in every so often. He has throngs of fans. Just not my thing. He is the butt of a lot of jokes, though.

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POETS Day! Talkin’ Chaucer at the Godsibbing Fense

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

I’m listening to a book about free speech and the necessity of, and the author went on for a few minutes about punishments meted out for violations of English law in Colonial America. It was amazing stuff. They’d cut off your ears for offending the Crown’s reputation, even for questioning it. Lucky loudmouths might get off with a cropping where they’d just trim off the ear tops. Tongues were bored, ears were nailed to pillories, many whippings of designated number and severity were prescribed.

One sorry SOB had his tongue bored, his arms broken, and then with his arms “dangling,” according to the author Jonathan Turley, was forced to run a gauntlet as men beat him with rifle butts.

What the hell did he say?

I hope he said it loudly. Clearly and from a high place on a stark, windy day. I hope his wind aided preferably bass voice carried across the land and turned the head of every man, woman, and child. I don’t know the content, but I hope he got the most from it.

This isn’t a segue to slippery slopes and non-crime hate incidents. It’s POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work and read a book. There are a lot of them out there. I’m enjoying Against the Country, by Ben Metcalf. Listening to a book, as I’m doing in the car with Jonathan Turley’s The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, doesn’t count. That’s not really reading, even if it is fun. Maybe read the Turley book, though. I’ve heard good things.

In any case, take time for a little verse first.

***

ITEM:

On May 4, 1380, Cecelia Chaumpaigne signed a quitclaim releasing Geoffrey Chaucer from “all manner of actions related to my raptus.” That’s a translation. The entire statement was recorded in Latin, as was customary. The word “raptus” is left untranslated and italicized as no one was quite sure exactly which of its uses common as legal terms at the time was intended in this case.

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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! Stephen Crane

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

It’s the last POETS Day under the Biden Administration. Put an early Friday lid on it and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Hit the beach and take a nap, ride a precarious bike, have some ice cream and meet the people. That hair ain’t gonna smell itself, Jack. Whatever you do, don’t waste the day working. It’s practically the weekend.

Literally take a minute for a little verse first.

***

In 1897, Stephen Crane was on a ship that sank. Subsequently, he spent thirty or so hours in a lifeboat with the ship’s captain and two crewmen. After getting safely back to New York, he wrote a short story called “The Open Boat” about the adventure. It’s harrowing.

“A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats… As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water.”

He does a good job putting you in the boat – putting anxiety in you – surrounded and claustrophobic in the troughs and hoping while knowing better you’d glimpse salvation somewhere on the horizon from the crests. Eventually the lifeboat flipped and they swam for it. Three made it to shore, Daytona Beach, sixty-two years before it was a NASCAR draw.

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POETS Day! Skipwith Cannéll’s “Nocturnes”

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

Birmingham may have gone out over its skis and declared a POETS Day pre-emptively. We don’t have snowplows, our shovels are sewing scissor-esque in that they’re solely for burying kin, and nobody can find the other glove. An inch of snow will paralyze us. The schools shut down and no one can get to work except liquor store owners who’ll do three Christmases and a mid-week Valantine’s Day worth of business in twelve hours. There’s a prediction of one to two inches by tomorrow morning.

I got the closing notice for my youngest’s school yesterday. My eldest’s sent an email this morning (I’m writing this on Thursday night) with an ominous pair of sentences about on-line assignments to follow (Mwu-hah-hah!). I can’t blame them for being overly cautious after the flash blizzard (three inches) of 2012 left teachers and students (not mine) stranded overnight. Rare snows put us in a bind, but I’ve been at home through more dire warnings that didn’t pan out as expected than I can count, leaving a city of day drinking dog walkers.

Nobody in my neck of the woods needs a POETS Day plan. We can’t Piss Off Early even though Tomorrow’s Saturday, because we’ll already be home. Good luck to the rest of you and your Northern ways. Fake a cough, maybe?

Whatever you gotta do, get out and have fun. But take time for a little verse first.

***

I’m pretty sure we all had the same initial thought, but this week’s featured poem was published in 1914 and the World War I biplane made by Sopwith and named the Camel due to an aerodynamic hump over the guns in the original design, wasn’t introduced until 1917. The similarity had no effect on Cannéll’s poetry; no resentment at being teased or bravado from a name evoking brief air superiority for a three year period before rapid development of technology tempered by the pressures of war led to predictable obsolescence.

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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! Richard Aldington

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[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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