Tag Archives: Poem

POETS Day! Anne Bradstreet

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is out!

It came out in 2006, but it came out again this week. It’s remastered and pretty and still has the Patrick Stewart voiceover. This was it for a lot of us – the video game that fulfilled the dream of a pixilated Dungeons and Dragons. The guild quests and coliseum fights are still there while the infuriating leveling system that trapped you into confidence and forced a restart because of misallocated experience perks is gone. And it looks great, on par now with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Not everyone cares. I understand. But please be courteous to those of us who do. We’ll be taking a POETS Day to defeat monstrous deadra and save the land of Cyridil. There’s a power vacuum in the wake of Emperor Uriel Septim VII’s assassination (AP, Chicago, and MLA all tell me the “’s” comes after the numerical in a possessive with a numerical name but it only looks mildly worse than “Septim’s VII.” There is no satisfaction.) so we gotta get on that. For the rest of you, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday for whatever reason draws you. You have my permission as soon to be head of the Assassin’s Guild.

First, a little verse.

***

from The Prologue
Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672)

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who sayes my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen all scorne I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits:
If what I doe prove well, it wo’nt advance,
They’l say its stolne, or else, it was by chance.

That’s the fifth stanza of the first published work of poetry from the English colonies in the New World. Defiant from the start.

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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! George Gascoigne, Birth of the Modern

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Illustration by Rene Sears

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

As a kid, I had a lot of Doonesbury books. Zonker was my favorite character. I particularly liked his professional tanning arc, prepping for the George Hamilton Classic. There was one strip where he was laying out for two panels with his tanning coach by his side. In the third, he sighs and says, “The thrill is gone, Bernie,” to which Bernie responds in the fourth, “It’s just a passing cloud.”

There are deficiencies in describing a comic strip where nuances may be lost, so trust me when I tell you that it was funny. As to the story, Zonker took a break from the rigors of training, refreshed, and got back to it. He won the Hamilton.

Sometimes you need a break in order to do well in the long run. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, read this.

***

“He brake the ice for our quainter poets that now write.” – Robert Tofte, 1615

from The Steel Glass
George Gascoigne (c.1535-1577)

O knights, O squires, O gentle bloods yborn,
You were not born all only for yourselves:
Your country claims some part of all your pains.
There should you live, and therein should you toil
To hold up right and banish cruel wrong,
To help the poor, to bridle back the rich,
To punish vice, and virtue to advance,
To see God serv’d and Belzebub suppres’d.

Continental poems had been translated into English in blank verse. There were dramas written in it as well, but above is the opening of first known original English poem written in blank verse. It’s not great. In his book Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use, Robert Shaw faults first word repetition as seen in the lines above, and in these he gives as example:

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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! 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! 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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[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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[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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