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

We’d swarm around my old neighborhood on BMXes with one or two banana seat hand-me-downs trying to keep up. There were a thousand kids kicked outside until dark every summer morning along four suburban parallel streets we considered our patch. Tractors came in 82 or 83 and clear cut a huge swath of wooded land; seven or eight football fields worth to build an office park. It was glorious.

We’d sit on the hill watching all afternoon and then descend when they broke for the day around three or four. Daylight Savings left us four- or five-hours sunlight to slop through upturned roots, climb hulking yellow diggers frozen like Bilbo’s trolls, and color blue jeans rusty with Alabama clay. I got my foot stuck in that clay one time and it took two other guys to pull me loose. Somewhere under the Embassy Suites with obligatory Ruth’s Chris that stands there now is a ten-year-old boy sized red Converse All-Star, the right one I think. Couldn’t get it out.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make it a POETS Day, go outside and play while there’s still four or five hours of daylight left.

First, some verse.

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I know very little about Yvor Winters, but from what I’ve read he liked to think himself immune to or outside the influence of popular opinion. He’s tagged as eccentric and a proponent of clarity and precision in form. Over his thirty-plus years as a professor of English at Stanford, he had to contend with giants. You can’t ignore the greats, but he seemed to get a kick out of championing lesser-known poets.